Fall, 1977 Carol Dietz got off the train in Boston and didn't look back. The way some people wait for the chance at an audition, or a job interview, or for the right look in someone's eyes across the aisle at the supermarket or at the laundromat, Carol had waited for Boston and college to catch up with her for years. She picked up her two suitcases from the luggage carrel and walked down the sloping floor to the street. She walked across the street to the T station, purchased a token, just one, and dropped it in the slot. The turnstile rolled away from her slowly. It might just as well have been an audition, but a very well-anticipated one. Carol knew she would have to change lines at Park Street Station, though she had never before been to to Boston. She had studied her T maps late at night for months and needed no directions. She changed to the Green Line and sat down, dropping the suitcases on the floor next to her. It was almost eight o'clock in the evening and had been dark for perhaps ten minutes, so she wasn't immediately aware of the train's emergence from the underground. She suddenly realized she could see car headlights, and in an instant her life began. * * * * * "Mom, this is crap," announced William Evans St. Clair III. "What am I going to do with five blankets? Would you put some of these back?" Bill's mother sighed and put three of the wool blankets away. "And can I borrow the good can opener, the good MANUAL can opener? I may end up living on Dinty Moore if I can't eat the stuff they have at BU." "I bought you your own," said his mother. She passed it over to him. He looked at it, then pulled the cardboard backing from it, threw the backing away, and put the opener in his suitcase. "Don't put it in there, they'll make you unpack your suitcase at airport security." "God, Mom, am I going to hijack a plane with a can opener? I'll just tell them what it is. Remember when I flew out of Erie with all those tools when I went out to help Gary fix his Porsche in St. Louis? I just told them what the stuff was and what I was doing with tools, and they said fine." "It's now 6:15," said his mother. "I hope this is the last of it all, because we have ten minutes in which to finish this and leave. Are you checking the clarinet or carrying it on?" Her son looked at her with affected great patience. "'Will you be checking the Crown Jewels, Your Majesty, or would you prefer to carry them on?' Have you seen what those airport goons in Erie do to luggage? I saw them drive over somebody's overnight bag with a forklift once." Bill closed the suitcase and the clarinet case, and locked them. "Let's go." * * * * * Marc Nordhoff reached behind his head and switched the Volvo's interior light on. He propped the Rand McNally atlas on the wide steering wheel and looked at the eastern end of Pennsylvania. Might as well take 81 up to 88 to the Massachusetts Turnpike. He put the maps back and turned up the Led Zeppelin tape on the stereo. It was almost six-thirty and with luck he might be in Boston at midnight. The boxes in the back of the wagon shifted and creaked, and the coils in the toaster oven began to buzz. Marc sipped a Pepsi and reached into the bag on the passenger's seat for a cookie. * * * * * Eric Joseph Singer was in the middle of his room, pulling blankets out of a box and listening to Janis Joplin, when the phone rang. After two rings, he answered it. "Hi, Marcy. Yeah, I'm back. They have a directory out already? Jeez, last year they didn't get one out until November. I decided to come back. Yeah, nothing else to do, and the Saab didn't feel like going to Wisconsin again. Uhhuh." He stood in the open doorway and silently waved at Steve, the RA, who was hanging a poster up on the bulletin board a few feet down the hall. "Beer? Sounds good. Where? Okay. You'll have to give me a couple of minutes to get all this shit moved out of the way. This place echoes." He paused. "Of course I'm the first one here. I'm ALWAYS the first one here. These freshmen are lazy bastards." * * * * * Colleen Corliss Stark spent the afternoon changing the oil in the new Toyota her parents had given her for her high-school graduation. She spent the evening loading it with boxes and her cello, and just after eight o'clock left Wolfeboro, New Hampshire for Boston. She stopped near Lowell for gas and arrived in the parking lot behind the dorm at 10:15. The cello was the first thing to go into the room. She was pleased to have gotten a single room, and pleased that her parents were paying for it all. * * * * * In her room in her parents' house in Midland, Michigan, Kelly Dennis carefully wrapped her new and untested diaphragm in a sock and tucked it into the sleeve of her favorite sweater. She closed the suitcase and locked it. * * * * * Carole Bachmann had been staying in a hotel near Boston University for two days. She had come up from Pittsburgh for late orientation and stayed to learn her way around the city. She was glad she had been able to bring her Fuji ten-speed and rode all over the east end of the neighborhood. She finally called a cab, tossed her few other possessions into it, rode the five blocks to the dorm, tossed a blanket over the bed, and fell asleep. * * * * * Megan Louise Shaughnessy was asleep on another train, her Alexander silver horn on the seat next to her. She had one hand wrapped through the handle of the case. For a while she had been wedged crosswise on the pair of wide seats, but her feet had slipped off onto the floor. Her head was on the aisle-side arm rest, her black hair hanging over the side and swinging slightly when the train crossed an expansion joint in the rails. She had been asleep since the train had separated in Albany, some of the cars going south to New York. Megan would have preferred to be going to New York, to Juilliard, but Richard had gone there and that would have been too loaded a situation. Boston had been her second choice. She thought about Berklee, and about the New England Conservatory, but there hadn't been enough time to apply. BU was a reasonable fourth choice. * * * * * Sandy Janeski left her mother's house in Landing, New Jersey in the early afternoon. She wanted to drive slowly so that her old Chrysler wouldn't burn too much oil, which it did if she went fast. Around town she had always driven fast enough to go through a quart every hundred miles or so, but driving to Boston would make that too expensive. She kept the car to about sixty well into Connecticut. She was glad to finally leave New Jersey. The place and the people were driving her out of her mind. * * * * * "Welcome to Boston University." Carol was amazed that the girl behind the table in the lobby still had any energy. She had obviously been sitting there repeating those four words all afternoon and evening. Carol set her suitcases down and picked up a packet of information from the table. It looked like so-this-is-dorm-life material, the sort of thing Carol expected. The girl also handed her a smaller packet and a form. "These are your keys, room 214." The girl paused for a second. "The form is for writing down any damage you find in the room when you move in. Fill it in and make sure you get everything on it, because otherwise you'll get charged for it at the end of the year. Fill it in and give it to your RA, who is..." She looked down to a sheet taped to the desktop. "Kim Frost. She's up there now, so she'll probably come by and say hello." The room was one flight up and near the end of the hall. The walls were a tired-looking tan color, the doorframes polished oak. If you didn't like the way your grandmother's attic looked, the place was a nightmare. Carol carried her suitcases to the door marked 214. The number plate on the door was painted black. She made a mental note to mark that down on the sheet, which she would fill out in a few minutes. Several people were in the hall, pulling boxes through doorways and making moving-in sounds. Carol unlocked the door of 214 and pushed the door open. Without turning on the light, which she knew would be fluorescent, and thus painful, she set the suitcases down and sat down on the bottom bed of the pair she knew would be there. She pushed the door closed. The mattress was cool and the noise level in the room manageable. Mysterious slamming sounds rumbled down through the floor, but not loudly enough to keep her awake. Carol fell asleep listening to a desk being dragged across the bare floor in 314. Two hours later the fluorescent light snapped on. Noise from the hallway rushed in and jarred Carol awake. The fuzziness in her head came back. "Sorry, we...uh, hi," said a girl. She was fairly tall and had long light- brown hair. She was framed in the doorway, surrounded by family and boxes. "I'm Karen kershaw." She radiated confidence and poise in quantities that made Carol uncomfortable. Carol was repulsed by anyone who could be that self-assured in awkward situations. "Hello," said Carol. She rummaged around for her glasses, which had slid off the top of the suitcase and slid under the bed. "I'm...Carol Dietz. Do you live... here?" She sat up and looked for a hairbrush in the pile of luggage. "They said '214,' so I guess so," said Karen. "These are my parents --" everyone squeezed into the room as if on cue "-- and my brother..." The room immediately felt overpopulated. Carol wasn't sure if she shouldn't leave to make room for them all. "Hello, I guess," said Carol, somewhat dourly. She thought that she was used to being awakened as a result of riding a thousand miles on trains, but somehow the experience didn't transfer well to a dusty dorm room on the west side of Boston. She stood up and smiled a forced serenity. * * * * * Eric was still setting things up in his room when the door rattled. Eric looked up in time to watch someone wrestle a box into the doorway and stop. "You're Eric," the person said. "You're Bill," said Eric. "Welcome to Boston University. I hope you party." He popped a tape in the deck and the bedframes hummed as Pink Floyd stormed out of the speakers. "Doesn't look like I have much choice," said Bill, looking up and pushing his wire frames back onto his face. "You don't," said Eric. "Have a beer." "What have you got?" Bill walked over to the refrigerator, bent down and opened the door. "Beer," said Eric. Bill pulled out a white can with black type. BEER. "Yup," agreed Bill. "Beer." He laughed. "Where the hell did you get this?" He popped the ziptop and sat down on a box. "who makes this?" "It's generic beer. Nobody knows who makes it," said Eric. "I think it's Heilemann, but it could just as easily be Joe's Brewery and Auto Parts in Elizabeth, New Jersey. I drink it and I'm still alive. Hell, it's cheap." "So, how long have you been here?" asked Bill. He stacked a couple of boxes up on the floor and set the beer on them. "Well, I'm technically a sophomore, about to become a junior," said Eric. "However, in terms of actual time, I've been a student here since some time in 1971. I haven't felt any big push to finish a degree." "What do you do in the off times?" asked Bill. He hadn't wanted to room with a wastoid, and it looked more and more like that was the situation he was getting into. "Work, or something?" "Actually, I usually get in the car and go traveling for a few months at a time," said Eric. "I find that to be more of an education than this place, and it's substantially cheaper. I hang around here too long, I get gray hairs." "So, why still live on campus?" "They won't send mail to my car, basically," said Eric. "Toss me another beer, huh? Ever heard of a group called Boston?" * * * * * Carol could feel the building humming. Actually, she wasn't sure. It felt as if it were humming, but it was hard to tell. She was lying on her side on the upper bunk, staring out the window at the street light. There was a bat cruising the light, snatching up moths as they circled the mercury-arc bulb. The bat was good. Never seemed to miss. Karen had finally gone to sleep. While her parents hovered, had moved in a mountain of boxes and bags. It was an amazing amount of stuff. Carol had never owned that many things in her entire life, let alone now to bring them here. They had unpacked what Karen considered the "critical" items: the coffeepot, thc curling iron and lighted mirror, the electric blanket. The rest was in various stages of unpacking all over the room. Karen said she would unpack the rest in the morning, saying repeatedly that they would "have to do something about this room." Carol was still a little disorien ted from being awakened by the family mob and wasn't sure what to say, so she just nodded. Karen had gone on chattering as they chose and made beds and got ready for bed. Mercifully, though, she had finally gone to sleep. Carol stayed awake for a few more minutes. She felt depressed somehow but wasn't sure why. She put it down to be awakened and left it at that, but something in her head also said that even though she was halfway across the continent now, and she had succeeded in getting here, she still had to contend with another person. People were everywhere, and it seemed as though no amount of effort would get them all out from underfoot. In the morning, a loud smash woke Carol up at ten minutes after eight. She stuck her head over the edge of the bed to see Karen sweeping up the pieces of a ceramic coffee mug. Karen looked up, embarrassed. "Sorry," she said. "I didn't mean to wake you up." Carol was going to say something about no problem, I usually don't wake up when people smash dishware at eight o'clock in the morning, but instead she just mumbled "It's okay." She climbed down off the bed, found her glasses and shuffled off to the bathroom. Actually, it wasn't okay in the least. She vowed to keep a tally of all the times this girl woke her up suddenly and send her a bill forty years in the future. She was puzzled about her own reaction, though. Normally she wasn't a resentful person and she wondered why she was becoming one now. Karen wasn't sure what to make of Carol. It seemed like this girl from Minnesota didn't talk except in monosyllables and wanted to sleep all the time. Karen tried to be as friendly as she felt she could be under the circumstances. After all, she had wanted to go to Columbia but hadn't been accepted. BU would have to do. There might be some worthwhile guys here, but Karen wasn't optimistic about that. The guys lilooked like jerks. Carol had said that she came to BU for music. Karen had known right then that she must not have known much about schools in the East. Nobody was at BU for music who was serious about it. For music, one went to Berklee or the New England Conservatory. People came to BU for things like Liberal Arts or graduate degrees in counseling. She, Karen, was at BU to study Art History. THAT was what BU was good for. Besides, everybody from Minnesota sounded like they were television newsmen or worked for the Labor Department. * * * * * Megan spent the rest of the train trip fending off the polite but annoying advances of a guitar player from New York who inting next to her and saying lots of brilliant-sounding pseudo-philosophical junk. He got off in Worcester after insisting on getting Megan's address in Boston. She unswervingly gave him the address for Symphony Hall. Then he was gone and she was left in peace. Megan sat back for the last fifty miles of the trip and thought about the thigs which would be happening. She wished that Richard hadn't been so difficult all summer. She would like to have him around for everything that would be happening. But he had chosen to be distant and cold and had gone to New York, to Juilliard, probably to be around other cold and distant people. * * * * * "It must have been something I said," said Marc. His RA laughed. "Yeah, I don't know how you did it, but apparently your roommate canceled out and they haven't assigned anybody else to the room," said Steve. "I say enjoy it while you can, because they'll put somebody in there eventually." "So, do I get billed for a single while they look around?" asked Marc. "I man, hell, if I have to pay for a single, I'LL go find a roommate and sign him up." "Or her," said Steve. "I wish," said Marc. "No, you don't get billed for the single," said Steve. "Enjoy it while you can, my friend." He carted some cardboard cutouts into the hall and began tacking them up on the bulletin board. "What the hell's a 'chunk chart'?" asked Marc. "Wait a week, you'll find out," said Steve. "Puttin' the chunk chart up again?" asked Eric. He stopped behind Marc and inspected the RA's handiwork. "We'll see who makes it this year." "What is it?" asked Marc. "It's a tradition here," said Eric. "I used to be on it a lot. Not too much these past few years, thvious occupants of the room. I LOVE JEFF announced one, in what looked like blue felt-tip ink. It was dated October 21, 1967. Carol wondered if the writer and Jeff were married and divorced already. She covered the bottoms of all the drawers with plain wrapping paper and began emptying boxes into the desk. In the bottom of one box she found a small army of felt-tip pens, her mother's idea. Carol sighed and threw them in with the rest of the armada. She hated felt-tips. There were a lot of things to be done today. She had to go to her orientation session, register for classes, buy books, buy some things for the room, and also had to go to the bus station to pick up a box of things her parents had sent Greyhound Package Express. Carol had sealed that box shut before she left Minneapolis, ensuring that she wouldn't be surprised by any last-minute additions to the shipment. Her mother had rambled on and on about sending some wool blankets, which Carol also hated. She took the T downtown and eventually found the bus station. She found the package pickup counter and rang a bell mounted on the wall. After several seconds, she rang it again. An attendant appeared, wordlessly, looking as if he'd just serviced several buses and had a hard time with each of them. She handed him the receipt for the box and signed for it. The attendant went into the back room wordlessly, returned with the box, plopped it on the counter, and vanished into the back room again. Carol waited for a moment, expecting him to reappear to help her with the box. It contained a stereo and everything heavy Carol had ever owned except her bicycle. She realized she was on her own with the crate, and set about wrestling it to the floor, where she had a folding luggage cart (one of her mother's better ideas). "Oh, God," she said. The box was plunging to the floor. Suddenly some extra hands appeared from behind her and total destruction was avoided. "Hey, thanks." "Sure, anything to avoid carnage," said her rescuer. He looked familiar to Carol, but she wasn't sure why. She noticed that he was wearing a Boston University sweater. "Do you go to BU or do you just have the sweater?" she asked. He looked down at the left breast of the sweater in mock surprise. "I GUESS so," he said. "Listen, you look like somebody I'm supposed to know. Are you?" "I don't know," said Carol. "You look sort of familiar also. You don't happen to live --" "THAT'S IT!" His excitement was absurd. "You live upstairs. I saw you when I was parking last night, and you were coming down the sidewalk from this Mercedes with this big crate of stuff." Carol grimaced. "My roommate was moving in," she said. "She's likes big crates of 'stuff.' I'm Carol, by the way. And I don't own a Mercedes." "Marc," said Marc. "Most college students don't. I sure don't. Wouldn't mind, though." He stepped up to the counter and rang the bell. Again, no one appeared. Marc rang the bell again. "Hm." He rang it several more times. "Must be salivating in the back room." Carol laughed. Marc rang the bell again. "They condition these guys pretty well. They don't drool too obviously." Eventually the attendant appeared. Marc gave him the receipt and the attendant went off to get the package. "I just hope they have a big mop back there in case the ticket clerks drool, too." Carol laughed again. "So, listen, you just got here? Isn't this a weird place?" Carol looked around the room. "No, not the bus station, I mean Boston in general. People are SO weird here, I can't believe it." Marc picked up the package as the attendant returned. They stepped away from the counter and Marc continued. "I tried to figure out how to use the trains here the other day and I ended up at this place called the Aquarium. It looked like some kind of mall or something. I left." "No, the Aquarium really IS one," said Carol. "I read about it before I got here. It's supposed to be good." "Can you buy fish there?" asked Marc. "You mean, to eat?" Carol was puzzled. "No, like tropical fish and things like that," said Marc. "They give any free samples?" Carol shook her head. "That's a drag." "Are you going to try taking the T home?" asked Marc. "I guess so," said Carol. "Well, I brought my car, if you don't want to try to drag that down the escalator and the stairs," said Marc. "I mean, you might trip over one of the winos and fall or something. I'm going back to the dorm, and I parked not too far from here. Driving in this city is far out." They walked up the street a block to Marc's car, the dusty 1969 Volvo wagon he'd driven from Pennsylvania in. The parking meter had run out, but there was no ticket to be found. They put the boxes in the back of the wagon and got in. "So, where are you from?" Marc started the car and let it warm up for a minute or two. "I came up last night from Pennsylvania." "I come from St. Paul, Minnesota," said Carol. "Well, actually it's South St. Paul, but it's the kind of place where if they didn't call it 'South Famousplace,' nobody would know where to look for it." "There's this guy on my floor who's like, 25 and really bizarre who said he was from Minneapolis or someplace around there. Actually he said that right now his home address is his car." Marc pulled out onto the street. "He has the best stereo I've ever seen. Probably the loudest, too." "I haven't met anybody yet who's actually from Boston, you know? They're all from someplace else," said Carol. "My roommate is from Maine and says she spends her summers in the city with her father. There's one girl on our floor who's from Taiwan or someplace. Where do all the locals go?" "I don't know," said Marc. "There's one guy on our floor who is from here, but he's the only one. I guess all the locals go to UMass or BC. Or they go out of state so they can spend a lot of money. The town I live in has a state college in it where my father teaches and my mom works, and most of the people at Clarion come from Philadelphia or Pittsburgh rather than Clarion. They do it to get as far away from home as they can and still be within range of the Sunday Inquirer." "I thought about going to a state college in Wisconsin across the river at a place called River Falls, but you're right, I decided I didn't want to be so close to home that I would want to go home to do laundry all the time," said Carol. "Not that Mom and Dad wouldn't have liked that, but it was just too close. Minnesota and Wisconsin have a deal where anyone in either state can get in-state tuition rates in the other states, so we can get further away from our parents and not be impoverished any faster." "Something to think about, yeah," said Marc. "I was accepted here, and it was the only major school I applied to. Yeah, I applied at Clarion, because I would get some kind of tuition break and be able to live at home, but I knew I wanted to come here. Nobody knows much about bassoon in Clarion, anyway." "You play bassoon?" asked Carol. "I play piano. At least, that's what I'm here to do. They offered me a scholarship -- which I took, of course -- to play and study. That was nice." "Same deal here. Even with the award and my National Merit and my grants I'll still end up spending about a thousand dollars a year. But it's worth it. I'd like to find a small orchestra in Boston to play in. This is the place to be if you like music," Marc steered around a delivery van parked in the middle of the street. "That, and the social life in Clarion is... well, dead. Nice place to go if you like old movies." He smiled. He could feel himself flirting, something he'd gotten good at after a summer spent chasing college girls up at CSC, with a surprising amount of success. After he'd broken up with Connie, his old girlfriend in Clarion, he had discovered that he was capable of a good deal of charm. The discovery was still a rather new toy and Marc hadn't gotten tired of playing with it yet. "I just hope they didn't damage my stereo or anything," said Carol. "Some of that I was worried about in shipment." "Be serious," said Marc. "Baggage handlers are pretty much all the same. I was in the airport in Chicago once and watched this guy drive over somebody's suitcase. You know, with one of those little carts they haul things around with? Kept going. All the little trailer carts went over it, too. You know those girls at the airline checkin counter? Sometimes they ask me if I want to check my bassoon?" He stopped talking and looked at her. Carol laughed.