I heard a familiar laugh. . . . Then I saw her. She was sitting among them, and I wondered who had made her
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laugh, wishing it had been me. She seemed to shine, making everything and everybody else in the room fade to insignificance. I looked around and wondered if anybody else saw her, but they all seemed too caught up in their corners of conversation to notice. How could they not? She was stunning. Radiant. I discovered that if I shifted my chair a little to the left, I had a clear view of her. I could watch her surreptitiouslythe band in front of her providing the perfect cover.
I imagined myself sauntering up to her and asking her to dance. What would she say? Would she just laugh or simply look right through me? Maybe my voice would crack, and I'd turn and slink away as if it had all been a mistake. Then I could simply spend the rest of my college years going around corners and taking roundabout routes to avoid seeing her.
At that moment, she turned toward the back of the roomher eyes searching as if she'd felt my thoughts on her. I blushed bright red when her gaze rested on me. I saw her lean over and whisper something to one of the brothers, and then she got up and weaved her way back through the cluster of tables. She was coming toward me.
For a moment, my heart began to race, thumping so violently I was sure she could see the fabric on my shirt moving. I looked over my shoulder and saw the ''Restroom" sign. I breathed a sigh of relief. Who was I kidding? I took one last sip of my ginger ale. It was time to go home.
"Hey, Rob, what are you doing back here all by yourself?"
I looked up, and she was standing right in front of me. She was smiling as if we'd known each other all our lives. I swallowed hard. My voice vanished into thin air. She pulled out a chair and sat down at my table.
"How'd you know my name?" I finally managed to mumble, several octaves higher than normal.
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"I asked around," she said with a twinkle in her brown eyes. "I always make a point of knowing the names of all the cute guys on campus."
I flushed a deep crimson, and even though I'm sure she noticed, she didn't mention it. She took a sip of my ginger ale and began to talk. She told me all about herself. Where she grew up. What her family was like. Her favorite movies, what she liked to eat, her hopes and dreams and disappointments. Fifteen minutes turned into a half hour, an hour became two. We talked and laughed like old friends. There were people all around and a band playing somewhere behind us, but I'd long since lost consciousness of the din of voices, the music, the smell of smoke. We'd slipped into our own worldone where a new friendship was being born.
By the time the band finished its third encore, Kim Lattanze had stepped off the pages of my imagination and into my life. She hugged me good-bye at the door and walked off into the night.
We became the best of college friends in the months and years that followed. On graduation day, we hugged good-bye and promised to always stay close. At first, we kept our pledge with cards, letters and numerous phone calls. Sometimes we'd run into each other at some alumni gathering or football game. She'd take me by the hand and pull me to a corner, where we'd take up right where we left off as she'd pepper me with questions about my family, career and love life. We'd always leave with a promise to be a little better at staying in touch.
But soon the times between promises grew longer and longer, and our paths took us in different directions. She moved to Atlanta and became a buyer for a department store, and I eventually packed up and drove to California to try my hand at screenwriting.
Fifteen years later, my thoughts sometimes still drift
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back to those college days. I recall an eveninga moment kept alive in the memory of Kim's smiling eyes. One small but unforgettable minute in time. A shy boy, a beautiful girl and the precious gift of friendship she'd brought to my table that night.
And now, when I invariably find myself scanning the corners of rooms at parties, I stay vigilantalways on the lookout for that timid stranger who might feel a little out of place, a little left out. I can recognize myself in those bashful souls, and then I think of Kim. What would she do in a situation like this? I walk over and say hello.
Robert Tate Miller
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819 Gaffield Place
A run-down, off-campus student house in a family neighborhood, 819 Gaffield Place was where Zoe, Judy, Lisa and I lived during our senior year at Northwestern University. The shingles were covered with yellow and brown chipped paint, and the roof was the pale, cloudy color of chocolate milk. A worn white sofa sat on the porch among piles of mail and coupons delivered to anyone who had ever lived there, and two bicycles were chained to the stair rail. To our neighbors it must have looked like a perpetual garage sale, but to us it was homeone that was always a soothing sight to me.
One night I walked there from my boyfriend's apartment after a fight. It was 2:00 A.M., silent and dark, but as I turned the corner past Philbrick Park, the lone street lamp illuminated Gaffield in the distance. I started to run, wanting to be there, to feel safe instead of empty. The curly numbers of ''819" came into view. When I opened the glass door and saw the first-floor light, tears welled in my eyes. I burst into the living room.
"Uh-oh," said Zoe when she saw my face. Grabbing her car keys, Judy said, "Slurpees." The others put on their sneakers. We always dealt this way with breakups, failed
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exams and bad news from home. There was something reassuring about a Slurpee always tasting the same no matter what time it was or which 7-Eleven we went to.
After driving to the all-night 7-Eleven, we headed for Lake Shore Drive, our favorite ride. Lake Michigan was calm outside the car window; inside I was comforted within the cocoon of my friends.
I would be okay.
I had not always felt okay. As a child growing up in New York City, I was often lonely. On Sunday mornings, I sat in our sleek, white Formica kitchen hoping my mother would wake up and make waffles with raspberry jam and maple syrup. But my parents, tired from late Saturday nights, stayed in their room with the door shut until noon.
Then, my parents divorced when I was twelve, and my mother moved out. Months passed between her visits and calls. Though I lived in my father and brother's world of football games and boxer shorts, what I really needed was someone to do my nails with, and talk girl-talk and cry to.
At our house, there was no such thing as being late for dinner because most nights I ordered from a pile of take-out menus. A "family dinner" meant we all ordered from the same restaurant, but we still ate separately, each one of us watching television in our own bedrooms. I knew the string of deliverymen who brought our dinners better than any neighbors.
So I was ready for Gaffield. I first saw the cozy house during my junior year when I visited a friend who lived there. Immediately, I arranged to live there next, and Zoe and Lisa were interested. To afford this house, we needed a fourth. The current Gaffield girls suggested Judy, who they knew was eager to move in. But Judy and I didn't like each other. A year before, she had dated a guy named Billy for a few months. Then I dated him. It turned out he
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cheated on each of us with the other. Billy was out of our lives, but the jealousy and resentment lingered.
"You're a lot alike," said our mutual friends.
"It's a big place. You'll hardly see her," said Zoe.
I wanted the house and warily agreed. We moved in on a June day after the resident seniors graduated. The price for all their furniture and dishes was fifty dollarsexactly what they had paid the girls before them and the price as long as anyone could remember.
For the first few weeks, Judy and I made stilted small talk when the four of us were together and avoided being left alone. One night I was boiling water for tea when Judy came into the kitchen to make popcorn. We proceeded in silence for several minutes. Finally, she spoke. "This is ridiculous. I don't care about Billy anymore."
Startled, I burned my han
d on the teapot. "Me neither," I said.
"But," she paused. "There are a few things I want to know." We talked for hours, sitting on the wooden countertop with a bowl of popcorn between us. My other friends had always dismissed Billy as a jerk or a phony, but Judy understood his allure and the pain he could cause. It felt so good to say what I wanted and to stop pretending that things were fine. When Zoe and Lisa came home and found us together, they began talking quickly, trying to break through awkwardness that was no longer there.
"It's okay," Judy interrupted. "We talked about everything."
The four of us had already lived in the same house for almost a month, but that night marked the beginning of our life together. We started developing rituals and routines. We had bagel breakfasts, walked to class together, grocery shopped on Wednesday nights. Returning from class on rainy days, I would count the slickers on the porch railing to see who was home. In the fall and winter,
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Sunday dinner was pizza, and in the spring we barbecued on the porch. But the best time was meeting at home at the end of each day.
One night I was late for dinner because I had a meeting with my American-literature professor. On my way home, I imagined Lisa, who loved to cook, at the stove in our kitchen and Judy, who preferred to watch, asking, "Isn't Michele's class over at five?" I walked faster. The second porch step made its familiar sigh as my foot landed on it.
"We were worried," said Judy when I walked in. Everyone was in her seat at the table beside the large window. The fourth chair was empty with a place set. My shoulders relaxed. I was back in my spot.
As seniors with most of our credits complete, we didn't feel guilty about cutting our afternoon classes. We would walk down the alley to buy tomato soup or candy at the deli and rent movies from the video store. We would spend the afternoon in the living room by the brick fireplace or on the plump sofa covered in blue velour worn to the color of a spring sky. We talked about everything, from what we were learning from our majors to what we were learning about sex. I knew whose boyfriend liked red lingerie and whose preferred none. When my boyfriend said, "Don't tell anyone," the Gaffield girls didn't count. I saw them as an extension of myself; nothing I told them would go beyond our circle.
At times like that I felt that we had become a kind of family. I realized family doesn't have to be your relativesfamily means that your life is part of someone else's like sections of hair that need each other to form a braid. Often I raced upstairs to my journal to record these scenes. Most of the entries ended with, "This won't last forever."
But in some ways it has. Seven years later, we all live in New York and see each other every few weeks. Recently, two nights before her wedding, I handed Lisa the blue
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satin garter I had worn at mine. On it I had sewn a piece of pink ribbon on which I wrote "The Gaffield Garter" in indelible ink. As the first of us to marry, I decided to pass my garter along. I know sisters who have such wedding traditions, and my old roommates are my sisters.
Occasionally, we talk about visiting Gaffield, but we haven't. We don't want to see other people's raincoats hanging on the porch railing or another car parked in the alley. We don't need to see that creaky houseit is inside each of us.
One mention of Gaffield, and all our faces relax with a softness usually reserved for remembering a first love. Recently, when I was giving blood, I felt faint and had to look away from the needle. "Think of something pleasant," said the nurse. "Like the Caribbean or ice cream."
Like Gaffield's rainy day smell or the softness of the blue sofa. Like seeing the curly numbers come into focus as I hurried down our street and ran up our porch steps.
That's my something pleasant, now and always.
Michele Bender
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An Unlikely Hero
Adversity reveals genius, prosperity conceals it.
Horace
When Dr. Gullickson was assigning project mates for his introduction to experimental psychology class, I secretly hoped he would pair me with a cute coed or at least a classmate I could have some fun with. Above all, I hoped he wouldn't assign me to work with the intense, fiercely competitive, singularly serious fellow who always wore dark clothes and apparently had a personality to match. As fate would have it, Dr. Gullickson very deliberately matched everyone in class and announced that I would be working with the one person in class I wanted to avoid.
I went up to my new lab mate and introduced myself. He looked at me as though I weren't there. I felt he treated me as though I would hold him back and probably cause his grade-point average to take a nosedive. He wasn't outright mean or abusive. He just gave me the impression he could do whatever project we dreamed up better if he did it alone. He was a loner, and I could only impede his research. He had important things to do, and I was going
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to be something of an annoyance he'd have to deal with.
Needless to say, I didn't look forward to an entire semester of being brushed off, but I tried to make the best of it and didn't say anything, lest I make things worse.
The project required each lab team to develop a hypothesis, set up an experiment to test the hypothesis, run the tests, do the statistical analysis and present the findings. Whatever grade the team received would be shared by both students. When my lab mate and I met to discuss our project, I was uneasy. Here was this challenging student who had a reputation for single-mindedness and good gradesthe exact opposite of me. I was out-matched. I actually wanted to drop the class at one point, but stopped short because I didn't want to give him the satisfaction of my chickening out. I asked my friends at work what I should do, and the overall response was to stick it out no matter what.
After lengthy discussions, we somehow agreed to do a study on the tactile-kinesthetic perception of space. I wasn't sure what it meant, but at least we had a topic. We started to meet regularly to formulate our plans, and every time I felt the project was more his than mine. The more we met, the more I resented his intelligence and his ability to cut through to the core issues. And I was aware he was much more advanced than I. He knew technical things and approached every detail with great singularity of purpose.
I, on the other hand, must have seemed naive, with little to offer. At one point I summoned up my courage and asked him why he seemed so uptight and serious. To my surprise, he replied that he didn't have time for small talk or petty people and things that would waste his time. He even went on to say that he didn't have many friends because most so-called friends were just a distraction. But, he added, when he did choose someone to be his friend,
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they would be a friend for life. I was floored by his cold and cynical response. Right then and there, I realized the end of the semester couldn't come soon enough.
As the semester wore on, we tried to fashion a simple yet elegant experiment. Part of our job was to select students who had volunteered to be subjects for our project. I decided to devote myself to the task of working with the subjects, while he developed the scientific model. I put in my two cents' worth whenever I could, but I still felt he was the driving force.
Then one day I got word that he was in the hospital. Apparently, he had been admitted for a hemorrhaging ulcer. The stress of getting the best grades, holding down a job and helping his girlfriend through the medical crisis she was going through had taken its toll on him.
When I visited him in the hospital, I noticed for the first time a sense of vulnerability on the face of my stoic lab mate. I knew that he was aware that I could blow the experiment, and our shared grade would shatter his lofty G.P.A. and possibly derail his chances for graduate school. I assured him I would not let him down and he should only concentrate on getting better. I would do my best. We both knew I'd have to do better than my best.
I had a formidable task ahead of me. I was in over my head, running the statistical data. I poured more time and energy into that project than I had ever done on
any assignment in my life. I was not going to let him see me fail and have it reflect on him. I was working the graveyard shift at my job, so I used whatever quiet time from midnight to 6:00 A.M. to work on the project. The work consumed me. There was a sense of challenge that completely overtook me. The question remained: Was I up to it?