It’s a fact that almost any offer of free food on a college campus will attract at least a small crowd, but perhaps the suggestion of work involved kept this one to about thirteen people. Val and I knew only one, James Whitney, whom we’d shaved last November. Platters of pizza slices and calzones were on the conference table, along with a coffeemaker and a note that told us to help ourselves. The organizer herself, one of the assistant deans, was late, and three of the guys devoured a calzone each and edged out the door before anyone could pin them down.
After seven minutes had passed and the organizer still hadn’t shown, a tall guy in a Terps sweatshirt, coffee in hand, looked about the room and said jokingly, “I suppose you’re all wondering why I called you here today,” and we laughed.
So did the assistant dean, who came in just at that moment, professional-looking and cheerful in her black slacks and gold sweater, her dark hair swept away from her face.
“Sorry. A meeting ran over, and I finally just had to bolt, but it looks like you were in good hands here with . . .”
“Marcus Kelly,” the tall guy said.
“. . . with Marcus. Have a seat, everybody. Introduce yourselves and have some more food. There’s another pizza in the warming oven.” She poured a cup of coffee for herself as we told each other our names, and then she sat down. “I’ll be brief and give you the basics. We can get into specifics later. The university is starting a new initiative, and we need your input. We’re concerned about our image and want to improve relations with the residents of our College Park community, not just by what we don’t do—hopefully, no more overturning cars after a football game or leaving beer cans on neighborhood lawns after parties—but by establishing interactions with residents in a constructive way. Students and residents as neighbors, not strangers. This is just a brainstorming session, so I’d like to hear any ideas you might have, no matter how far-out.”
Someone suggested a volunteer cleanup brigade after games, but the dean said that was still just a breaking-even kind of thing. She was looking for plusses—making a difference by adding something that wasn’t there before.
“Maybe transporting elderly or handicapped people around?” red-haired Samantha said.
We vetoed that. “The only free time students have is on weekends; the elderly don’t have doctor appointments then, and most of us don’t have cars,” someone said.
“Plus, liability if anyone got hurt,” Marcus added.
Another ten minutes of debate, another few slices of pizza. If there’s anything college students hate more than warm beer, it’s boring meetings that go nowhere.
Devon, the guy next to me, said, “If we’re looking at service projects, they need to be something that the Kiwanis Clubs and churches wouldn’t already be providing.”
“Car wash?” I offered.
“Or a free raking job when the leaves fall,” suggested another girl.
Then we started to come alive.
“Yes! Something that’s outdoors, where we can meet the whole neighborhood—anyone who stops by,” said James.
“I like it,” said the dean. “If expenses are minimal, the university will spring for it. And of course we can provide the buckets, the rags, the rakes . . .”
“The pizza?” asked Marcus. “We’ve got to have bait.”
“And the pizza,” said the dean, and checked her watch. “I’ve got to pick up a kid at soccer. You guys are great. Could you work out the details and leave them with my secretary?”
I thought about the Saturday Market in Eugene, people selling what they did best—baked bread or woven baskets.
“Why don’t we start a . . . a sort of registry?” I suggested. “Get students to sign up for whatever they do best.”
And guess who got appointed registrar?
Marcus agreed to be chairperson.
“We going to have a name for this?” James asked, eyeing, then reaching for the last calzone.
“That would help,” said Valerie. “What are we, exactly?”
“Obviously an outreach program of some kind,” said a guy at the end of the table. “Community Outreach Organization? COO?”
“Hmm. How about SCOO—Student/Community Outreach Organization?” said Samantha. “And if we could put a ‘P’ on the end . . .”
Everyone likes big ideas, but nobody likes details.
“Naw, naw, naw!” Marcus groaned. “Just SCOO. So-Come-On-Out. That’s what we’re trying to say, isn’t it?”
So SCOO it was, and for a start, we settled on a car wash the second Saturday of October, a leaf-raking in November. Then, to get the publicity going and to persuade our friends to join in, we came up with a motto: “Do it for your community. Do it for your school. Do it for yourself.”
“See you at the car wash,” Valerie told the others as we stood and stretched.
“Beer party after?” asked Devon.
“Sure, why not?” said Marcus.
“We can probably talk Claire and Abby into taking part,” I said to Valerie as we walked back across campus, “and I’ll work on Dave.” I liked the idea of extending ourselves beyond the campus in even a small way, being part of the adult world we’d be entering all too soon.
But Claire met us in the hallway when we got up to the second floor and couldn’t wait to tell us news of her own.
* * *
“Come on in,” she said, motioning toward one of the two beds, where Abby was sitting, legs pulled up with the soles of her bare feet touching. Abby put aside the magazine she’d been reading and patted the spread.
“Show’s about to begin,” she said as we sat down beside her. “I have no idea what it is, but Claire’s been waiting for you guys to get back.”
Claire’s face was beautifully made up, the blush applied just so on her cheekbones, the eyeliner perfectly smudged on the lids, eyelashes long and luxuriously coated with mascara, eyebrows delicately arched and extended, dwindling to fine lines of brown out toward her temples.
“Wow, Claire, you look great!” Valerie said. “What’s the occasion?”
“I just want to share something wonderful, and I can hardly wait to tell you about it,” Claire said. She reached down and pulled out a shiny magenta case from under her bed. Magic Myst, it read in silver script across the top. She ran one hand over the letters, then said, “This may well pay my way through college,” and she opened the case.
Like a jewelry box, two flat shelves slid out sideways. The bottom of the case, the shelves, and the inside of the lid were filled with cosmetics of every kind.
“My God! It’s the Avon Lady!” Abby joked.
“No, better than Avon,” Claire said. “There are specific colors for every skin type and hair color, and all of these are scientifically formulated for the skin cells of women aged eighteen to twenty-two. Anyone can use them, of course, but they were created especially for college women.”
“The skin cells know if you’re in college or not?” Valerie quipped, still thunderstruck by the extensive display propped on the other bed.
“You know what I mean, Val,” Claire said. “I’ve been using these for the past two weeks, and I can tell the difference. I could never go back to Revlon or Clinique, believe me.”
“So . . . are you selling this stuff or what?” I asked.
“That’s the best part,” Claire said. “I don’t just sell the product. Every customer gets a free skin cell analysis but, better yet, I sell executive assistantships. Here’s how it works. . . .”
I began to get an uneasy feeling.
Claire was ready for her demonstration, and she unfolded a chart that she propped against the lid of the Magic Myst case. She pointed to a little silhouette of a woman near the top. “I make money two ways: by selling cosmetics and by selling executive assistantships. I get fifteen percent of the price of the cosmetics, but I get thirty percent for each assistantship.”
Next she pointed to three little silhouettes below the figure at the top. “And I get a percentage of th
e sales of each of the assistants. When these girls sell either products or assistantships, I get a percentage of those sales, too.”
Now she was pointing to a row of nine little women below the three. “Technically, there could come a point where I wouldn’t have to sell any more cosmetics at all because I’d be making a lot from the percentages of all the girls below me, and they’d be getting a percentage of all the women below them. I am so psyched!”
“Gosh, Claire, are you sure about all this?” Abby asked.
“Sandra explained—”
“Sandra?”
“My friend at GW referred me to her. She said she’d heard about this fabulous way to make money, and the cosmetics are terrific, too.”
I’ll admit she looked great.
“Sandra took me out to dinner four times, and no Big Macs either. She knows some great restaurants in Silver Spring, and we talked all evening. She even picked me up in her BMW. No hard sell or anything, except she won’t be in the area again for six months or so. . . .”
“What did you have to do to get this?” Valerie wanted to know. We were still sitting on the edge of Abby’s bed. Nobody had settled back against the pillows.
Claire lovingly released the hinges on the flat shelves and closed the case. “Well, that was the hard part, because you have to buy the case and you have to buy your own cosmetics. But, like Sandra pointed out, all I have to sell are two executive assistantships and I will have paid for my case, and from then on, I start making money every time the women I recruit make a sale.”
“How much does a case cost?” I asked.
Claire winced a little. “Well, it comes with an executive assistantship. Just three hundred dollars, but—”
“Three hundred dollars!” we cried, all together. “Claire, where did you get the money?”
“It’s okay, it’s okay,” Claire said. “I went off the meal plan and used that money.”
“You what? That’s over two thousand dollars,” I said.
“Well, I bought a friend’s car too—a down payment, I mean—because I expect to be making a lot of sales off campus and . . .” She saw the shock on our faces. “Believe me, I’ve thought all this through.”
I was still trying to run the calculations through my own head. For the last few years, relatives had given me mostly checks and cash for presents, knowing how desperate I was to have some savings when I’d finished college, and the thought of risking a big chunk of that on makeup . . .
“Well, wow!” said Valerie. “What can we say? Good luck and all that.”
“Thanks. I didn’t even try to give you the full demonstration, but I’ll give you the price list of all the cosmetics, and I’ll even give you the package deal. Moisturizer, makeup base . . .”
“How much is a package?” I asked.
“Blush, lip gloss, mascara . . .”
“How much?” Val insisted.
“Forty-nine ninety-five,” said Claire.
“Oof,” said Valerie. “It’ll be a while.”
Claire glanced up at the crazy clock above Abby’s bed on which all the numbers were in Chinese. “Gotta go. I’m meeting up with a senior over in South Campus Commons. Sandra said she sold an assistantship to her last week, and the two of us are the only ones on the whole campus selling Magic Myst. So it’s sort of a partnership. See you guys later.”
When she had gone, we sat for a few seconds, pondering what she’d just told us.
“You think she’s lost her mind?” asked Valerie.
“No, but she may have lost three hundred dollars,” said Abby.
“Not to mention her food allowance for the semester.”
“Well, maybe she’ll surprise us all and get rich,” I said. “Meanwhile, Valerie and I went to an interesting meeting this afternoon, Abby, and we’ve got a proposition to make.”
“Not you, too!” Abby said. “I don’t want to hear it.”
* * *
I’m not sure if it was the gorgeous October day, or the suggestion of a beer party later, or the appeal of the leaflets Samantha distributed around campus (“People Who Need People”), or the little quips tacked up on bulletin boards: If your dad’s car was here, would you wash it? and A neighborhood in need of love. . . . I’m not even sure what drew the committee members to SCOO—probably different for each student. Devon was planning to attend divinity school after he graduated, and Marcus had relatives in the neighborhood. But maybe, as the pamphlets said, we were just people who needed people or who liked being needed ourselves. Whatever the reason, the car wash was a hit.
The university supplied the hoses and sponges and a fresh box of Krispy Kreme doughnuts each time the last one ran out. We had students who knew nothing at all about SCOO drawn to the scene just by the scent of the doughnuts, and then they found themselves washing the hubcaps of a Buick. We assigned Dave to stand out on the circular drive to direct traffic.
“You sure there’s no charge here?” a puzzled woman asked as she watched James and Valerie attack the mud on her Jeep.
“It’s just a thank-you to the community—a chance to meet our neighbors,” James assured her. “You a native Washingtonian?”
“No, we moved here from Idaho when my husband got transferred. Where are you from?”
“Frederick.”
“Where Barbara Fritchie stuck her old gray head . . . ?”
“Yep. That’s the place. House is still there.”
A beefy man in sweatpants and a tee was talking to some of the guys about the Terps quarterback this season as we scrubbed the roof of his Honda.
Pickup trucks, sports cars—we even had one or two smart cars and a Mini Cooper.
It was one of those times I wished we could bottle all the smiles and good feelings we got that day. I think we hit an emotional chord with the If your dad’s car was here . . . line. It reminded us of autumn days back on our own driveways—washing the car, mowing the grass, being part of the family—and getting a little of that here. If we couldn’t do it for our own family, we could do it for someone else’s. Maybe some of those people had children or grandchildren at colleges halfway across the country, and for this one afternoon we were stand-ins.
“Three Krispy Kremes . . . only three left,” a large guy from the wrestling team was calling, holding the box high above his head as he walked around gathering up trash. “Going once, going twice . . .”
By four o’clock the trash was gone, the hoses, sponges, and squeegees carted off, and the assistant dean, who had arrived for the last hour with two kids in tow, couldn’t have been happier. Neither could we.
“Got a good neighborhood vibe going. Great job, everybody,” Marcus said.
* * *
We headed back to our dorms to clean up, then meet up again at Chipotle, and after that, on to RJ Bentley’s Filling Station, a favorite local hangout.
Dave rubbed my shoulders as we sat at the bar, his big hands kneading the muscles between my shoulder blades. It felt delicious.
“Thanks for helping out today,” I told him, above the music and chatter. “We had a good turnout.”
“Get many takers for November?”
“Not yet. I’m trying to get people to sign up for anything at all—whatever turns them on. How about you?”
“I don’t know. I’m a fair poker player.”
“Anything else?”
“Paddling a canoe?”
“Uh . . . keep going.”
“Shampoo a dog?”
“You’re getting there,” I told him.
8
BACHELOR NO MORE
I loved the periwinkle-blue dress I’d bought for Lester’s wedding. Gwen helped me find it, agreeing that I’d be the “first beautiful thing” people laid eyes on when they walked into the church on Cedar Lane. It had a jewel neckline and elbow-length sleeves, with two layers of fabric beneath the hem, each a slightly different shade of periwinkle.
I’d accepted the fact that Stacy would have only a maid of honor at her weddi
ng, and that I wasn’t it, but no one was giving her a shower either, I found out. What happened was that all of Lester’s friends there in West Virginia planned a so-called bachelor party, but something the girls could enjoy too—simply an evening out for everyone, with the guys paying the bill. Then the girls planned a party, guys included, and the women picked up the tab. Instead of a shower, Stacy and Les were going to throw a housewarming party after they moved in together, and friends could look around and bring them whatever they didn’t have. I guess there are as many ways to get married and celebrate as there are happy couples, and once I realized that, the rest came easy.
Stacy liked our church in its wooded setting, and that made up for a lot. Dad and Sylvia were elated.
So was I, but I had my own plans. If Les thought he and Stacy could get married without any high jinks from me, he was mistaken. The first person I called after I’d found out they’d set the date was Pamela.
“We’ve got to do something!” I’d told her.
“Trust me,” she said, so I did.
Now that Pamela had an associate’s degree from her theater arts school, she was working for an advertising firm. But she still had a lot of contacts at the school. So she recorded the musical accompaniment to a popular Gershwin song and changed some of the words for us. A day before the wedding, she arrived with a CD.
We had celebrated Thanksgiving at a country inn near Stacy’s parents’ place in Virginia. The rehearsal dinner was scheduled for Friday night and the wedding for Saturday evening. Gwen and Pamela and Liz and I spent most of Friday practicing our performance. Both Gwen and Pamela had professional-sounding voices, and Liz did all right too. My job was simply to offer the toast in my beautiful new dress, so Les wouldn’t suspect a thing, and then announce our surprise.