Penelope (2 page)

Two men were sitting at the registration table. Both were about twenty and one had a ponytail. They were laughing at something.

“I know, man,” said one of them. “What would we do without old Fermat kicking us in the balls?”

“Hello?” said Penelope.

“Oh, hi,” said the ponytail while the first one recovered himself. “What can we do for you?”

“I’m here to register. I’m a freshman. Penelope O’Shaunessy?”

“O’Shaunessy, O’Shaunessy, ahh, here we are. You have two roommates, as you must already know by now, and you live in Pennypacker, which you also probably know. Here is your key. You live on the third floor …”

“Um, where is Pennypacker?” asked Penelope. “Is it that one?” She pointed to a large brick building with a neoclassical stone porch. A handsome man with chin-length blond hair was walking past it. He was wearing a three-piece khaki linen suit and laughing into a cell phone, like the regent of a tiny, unpronounceable
European principality. Penelope wondered if he was drifting toward the registration desk. It seemed as though he was going to.

“Oh, no, it’s actually down past the library, across the street,” Ponytail said, pointing to an unseen building. Penelope craned her neck, but she was distracted by the blond man, who really was heading toward the registration desk.

“But I thought all the freshmen lived here,” Penelope said.

“Most all of them do,” Ponytail said. “You, on the other hand, live in a converted apartment building above a radio station.”

“Oh,” said Penelope. She was disappointed but tried to hide it. The blond man was now within earshot.

“The radio station is great though,” said Ponytail. “Sometimes they play music for twenty-two hours at a time, uninterrupted.”

“Is that fun?” said Penelope.

“Only if you like flutes, darling, and honestly, who does? In their heart of hearts,” said the blond man as he walked by. Then he was gone.

Penelope walked to her dorm in dejection. Her mother was simply confused.

“But I guess I just don’t understand where it is. Do you know where it is? Why is it over a radio station? Who was that guy?” she kept asking Penelope.

“No. I don’t know,” said Penelope as she trudged past the library. She wondered if these were the dorms where Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber, had lived. She remembered from her experience reading conspiracy novels that when Ted Kaczynski was a freshman, he lived outside the Yard, which was apparently the place where the administration put the aberrations of the Harvard community. Penelope wondered what the admissions committee had thought about her. It was probably her essay on car seats that put them off.

When they finally arrived at the dorm, Penelope and her mother were pleasantly surprised. It was redbrick and had white trim. Even if Pilgrims hadn’t actually lived in this building in particular, it still looked as if they could have. That was all that Penelope could have desired.

“This is nice,” said Penelope’s mother. “I’m gonna get the car.”

“OK,” said Penelope. “I’ll wait inside.”

Inside the dorm there was a large lobby and a spiral staircase. A boy wearing a butter-yellow polo shirt was moving a mini fridge up the stairs. Penelope thought about the man in the rumpled linen suit. It was possible he lived in her dorm—but she doubted it.

After Penelope’s mother arrived, they lugged all of Penelope’s possessions up to the third floor and opened the door. The room was composed of a large common room with a bedroom on either side (a single and a double). There was also a small white bathroom next to the single, which was good because Penelope’s mother was petrified of coed bathrooms. Penelope assumed she was in the double, since the single seemed to be taken already.

Penelope examined her room, which was shared with a woman who had a predilection for aggressive neatness. Her bedspread was white. Above her bed, she had a poster of Madeleine Albright wagging her finger beneficently. Penelope didn’t even know they made posters of Madeleine Albright. “Bully for her,” Penelope intoned softly so her mother couldn’t hear.

After contemplating things of a minute, while her mother put together a shelf in the common room, Penelope decided to make her bed. She put up her posters, which mainly consisted of one five-foot-wide panorama of Diego Luna doing a split on the set of
Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights
—Penelope had decided the poster would be an excellent conversation topic, because that is a movie everyone likes. She then put her desk lamp on the desk. She felt done.

“I really feel ready,” she announced to her mother, who was holding a screwdriver between her teeth.

“Good,” said her mother.

“I think we are all done.”

“Put your toiletries in the bathroom,” said her mother, pointing in that direction.

Penelope sighed. She went back to her room and got her pink shower caddy, which contained shampoo, two hair dryers, and four razors, all in various phases of oxidation. Her roommates had left barely any trace of themselves in the bathroom, each decorously displaying only one clean razor and no shower caddy, as if already demonstrating their superior hygiene and sophistication. Then she opened the medicine cabinet. It was filled with tiny bottles of pills, most of which were Valium.

Penelope closed the medicine cabinet and went back into the common room.

“Well,” said her mother, “the shelf is done.”

“Awesome,” said Penelope. The shelf seemed to be missing one leg. Penelope put a book on it.

“Have you unpacked everything?”

“Yup,” said Penelope.

“Well, then I guess I better be getting back,” said Penelope’s mother, bursting into tears.

“Oh, Mom … Don’t be sad.” Then Penelope started crying too.

“You are going to have the best time here. Finally you are going to have friends, and maybe even a boyfriend.”

“I don’t want to yearn after impossibilities,” said Penelope, hiccoughing.

“OK,” said Penelope’s mother.

“I am gonna miss you though.”

“We are gonna miss you so much too. Call me as soon as your roommates show up. I think you might really like that Lan girl.”

Penelope walked her mother downstairs and watched her get in the car and drive away. This was it. She was on her own.

Many people have said that you can learn from history, or that history repeats itself, but Penelope did not agree with either
of those droll sentiments, at least in application to her social life. Because sometimes history has new eras of unprecedented behavior, and that is what Penelope was hoping to happen to her at college

It was now four o’clock. All she had to do was wait for her roommates to come back so they could all skip laughingly to dinner.

Penelope’s roommates still weren’t back yet. It was now nine p.m. She had been lying on the floor of the common room watching the only available channel on the TV for three hours. Luckily she found a rerun of the day’s
Oprah
in which Oprah interrogated teen prostitutes. It was pretty hard-hitting.

“But why did you turn to sex to make money?” Oprah was asking a sixteen-year-old blond girl who seemingly had no idea why she didn’t become a bank teller.

Enough of this!
thought Penelope. In her exceedingly detailed fantasies about college, this is not how she thought the first night was going to progress. She got up and decided to investigate.

The dorm looked menacing when empty, kind of like a manor house where a vicious housekeeper might convince you to throw yourself down the stairs. Penelope shivered and crept down the hall. As she neared the second floor, she heard voices coming from a small room directly below her own. The door was ajar. She knocked. Someone yelled, “Who’s there?”

“It’s me, Penelope. I live upstairs?” She pushed open the door. Inside the room, which was much like her own, there were four boys, two sitting on a blue corduroy futon and two sitting on the floor. The two on the futon were looking at their laptops. The two on the floor were sharing a beer. They all stared at her in a pointed but uninterested way. Then they went back to their activities.

“Nikil,” said a boy sitting on the futon, who was wearing a
pair of thin rectangular glasses, to the other boy on the futon who was not wearing glasses, “do you know Sheila Bronstein?”

“That name sounds really familiar,” said the one that was presumably Nikil. “Did she go to Stuy?”

“No, Science,” said Glasses.

“Those girls were all so busted,” said Nikil. “But it’s weird. I feel like I know her. It sounds so familiar.”

“Do you want to play checkers?” asked Glasses.

Nikil nodded. Apparently he and Glasses were the only ones talking/able to play checkers. Everyone else stayed motionless on the floor, while Glasses and Nikil went to find the checkerboard in a large Tupperware full of other board games.

“Hi, I’m Penelope,” said Penelope again to the other two. “I’m from Connecticut.”

“Hi, I’m Jason,” said a remarkably egg-like person with red mottled skin and a mop of flaxen hair. The effort of salutation seemed to exhaust him. He lapsed into silence.

“Ted,” said the other one. Ted looked a little like Penelope would expect Mark Anthony to look, as he had small curling bangs.

“Do you live here?” asked Penelope.

“Indeed,” said Ted. “Jason lives across the hall.”

“I wonder what across the hall is like,” said Penelope.

“What?” said Ted.

“Nothing,” said Penelope.

Nikil and Glasses came back from the Tupperware. They seemed surprised that Penelope was still there.

“Hi,” said Penelope. “I’m Penelope. I’m from Connecticut.” Then she remembered her mother’s admonition to be silent. It was too late now. Pretty soon she would be talking about the car seat.

“You guys are the only people who I have met in the dorm,” she continued.

“Yeah,” said Glasses. “That’s ’cause everyone else is at the panel.”

“The panel? What panel?” Penelope asked.

“Oh, the panel on medical school admissions,” said Nikil.

“But medical school is like six years away from now,” Penelope said.

“Yeah, I’m more interested in finance. But I’m waiting for the one on law school. That’s on Thursday,” said Nikil.

“Me too, man,” said Glasses. They high-fived.

“I mean, it’s not like this is some blow-off week,” said Nikil, addressing everyone and no one. “This week’s for us to take stock of our futures. We have to take placement exams, we have to meet with our proctors, we have to choose our classes. It’s going to involve a lot of time. I’m planning on having a busy semester.”

“What are the placement exams?” asked Penelope.

“Did you read the freshman orientation materials at all?” asked Nikil, aghast. “The placement exam is the test they give this week to place us into the correct required math and English courses.”

“Oh, those,” said Penelope. “I thought those weren’t a big deal and we couldn’t study for them or anything. When are they?”

“In a couple of days,” said Glasses. “That’s why we’re staying in tonight. We can relax a little later at the ice cream social. I am going to at least see if I can get into Math 55.”

They high-fived again. Penelope noticed for the first time that Glasses was wearing a mock turtleneck even though it was approximately 105 degrees outside.

“I didn’t realize the placement exam was so soon. But I mean, there is nothing you can do to prepare for them. We don’t have to stay in. This is our first night here, in college,” said Penelope.

No one replied to this, so Penelope started giggling.

“You know, when I was little …” she started.

“What are you gonna major in?” asked Ted, as if sensing disaster was ahead.

“It’s ‘concentrate.’ As in, ‘What are you going to concentrate in?’ ” said Glasses. He slowly placed one red checker upon another red checker. This seemed to please him immensely.

“Um, I don’t know. Maybe English,” said Penelope.

“I have never heard that before,” said Ted.

“English?” said Penelope.

“Well, that is what it is called,” said Glasses. “It’s not called a major. It’s called a concentration. Personally, I think that terminology makes it much clearer.”