STARTING OVER (38 page)

“Why did you go back?”

“Kevin has a way of whining and hanging around and it just . . . well, wore me down I guess.  Why do you ask?  Do you want to take him off my hands?” she smiled and glanced over half seeking a reaction.

“Hey, I’m back here.  I probably shouldn’t be hearing this,” Ted spoke from the back seat.

The girls continued as if they hadn’t heard him.

“God knows I have enough trouble with Barry,” Carolyn complained.

“Every time I go through this, and it happens too often, I'm torn between wanting him back and kicking him in the balls.  How are you and Barry doing now that you’re back from summer break?” Donna asked.

Carolyn turned toward Donna as if to reinforce the seriousness of what she was going to say.  “I don't get how people wake up one day and all their feelings for someone are suddenly gone.”

“With Barry?”

“Still back here,” Ted called more loudly.

Donna gave him a dismissive wave,
then said to Carolyn.  “Yes, I do.  Do you ever have that awkward realization that you have nothing in common with the person you sometimes love and sometimes hate?”

“Fuck!” Carolyn yelled and pounded her fist on her knee.

“What happened?”

“I think that you and I are in the same spot but for different reasons.  I can’t get a serious minute out of Barry.  When we’re talking and his guitar is there, he picks it up and starts singing…”

“…and badly too”, Donna offers.

“
Very
badly.  He just doesn’t take life or us . . . or me seriously.  How do you deal with Kevin putting off his classes and taking five years to graduate?  What are you going to do when they draft him because he hasn’t earned his degree after all this time?”

“He’ll start his 6
th
year in January.  I think he has become a professional student.”  Donna shrugged.  “I don’t know about him, but I’m graduating in the spring, and then I’m moving on . . . with or without him.”

“This Vietnam thing worries me.  Three years of investing myself with Barry, and I may have nothing to show for it,” Carolyn lamented as she stared out the window at the students and parents carrying boxes and suitcases and pulling luggage carts into the dorms.

“Look, just drop me off here,” Ted interrupted, almost frantic to escape the car and the conversation.  “I’ll walk the rest of the way.”

“Sit tight.  We’re almost there.”

Donna’s Dart finally pulled onto the campus and headed to Pill Hill.  Ted gratefully fled into the infirmary, and Donna continued the two blocks to Prentice Hall.

Prentice Hall was one of many women’s dorms on campus.  It wasn’t one of the older dorms, nor was it new, and there were only two girls to a room.  The baby boomers had put a definite crimp on the campus facility planning process.  The only closer women’s dorm to where
most of Donna’s physical education classes were held used to be a men’s dorm.  It was nearly forty years older and lacked a lot of the creature comforts like enough showers needed for that many girls to wash their hair on a Friday or Saturday night, the peak days of female fix-up.  To compensate for the lack of full showers, the University took the time and expense to install hand sprayers on top of the old urinals in the bathrooms on every floor.  Donna had spent her first two years in that dorm, but this year she had been able to get into the much preferred Prentice Hall.

“This is where I stop,” Donna said as she looked solemnly at Carolyn.  “I don’t have the answers . . . wish I did.  Barry’s a decent guy, but then I used to think that about Kevin, too.  Listen, you got my number if you need to talk.”

Carolyn leaned over and hugged Donna tightly. “I’ll tell you this much, the next time I follow my heart, I’m taking my brain with me.”  Her eyes welled with tears as she reached over and opened the door to leave.

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