Beware of Love in Technicolor Read online

  Beware of Love in Technicolor

  by

  Kirstie Collins Brote

  “I have dreamt in my life, dreams that have stayed with me ever after, and changed my ideas; they have gone through and through me, like wine through water, and altered the color of my mind. And this is one: I'm going to tell it - but take care not to smile at any part of it.”

  -Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights

  “What matters most is how well you walk through the fire.”

  -Charles Bukowski

  “What about prom, Blaine?”

  -Andie, Pretty in Pink

  Stepping out into the glaring sunlight from the dark backseat of my mother’s Honda Accord, I squinted my eyes and got my first look at the brick monstrosity I would now be calling home. Feeling like Dorothy as she stepped out of her freshly shaken house to discover a world of Technicolor, my stomach lurched, and I felt the half-eaten breakfast sandwich from the Burger King up the street threaten an encore appearance. Unfortunately, it was not the contents of my own nervous stomach that would be my problem.

  I had seen them coming. As my father wound my mother’s sedan up the quaint road lined with neatly-kept professor’s homes, I had noticed the girl first. It seemed strange that she wore three inch heels and a dress hemmed in sequins at nine o’clock in the morning. The guy she was with, much less formally attired in shorts and a t-shirt, was holding her elbow, and seemed to be guiding her along the sidewalk as her knees wobbled in her black pumps.

  And so as I stood there staring at my new dorm on the sidewalk five minutes later, backpack slung over my right shoulder, waiting for my father to pull my suitcase out of the trunk, I turned in time to hear a male voice.

  “Just a few more steps, Sandy.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Just a few more.”

  And that is when it hit me.

  There are many words available in the English language to convey the performance of puking. Barf. Hurl. Ralph. Honk. But noticeably lacking are the methods with which to describe being puked upon.

  “Oh my God!” I cried out as I was hit with a chunky liquid rainbow of what I quickly surmised was red wine, French fries, and something resembling blue Tic-Tacs. From the knees down I was covered. I froze, my mind delving deep to suppress the gag reflex that was playing hockey with the aforementioned breakfast sandwich.

  Her male companion, his face nearly as pale as my own, dropped the hung-over girl’s elbow and jumped back about five feet. My father, upon hearing me yelp, raised his head too quickly, and smacked it on the top of the open trunk. My mother, already standing, empty-handed, at the top of the stairs of Wyndham Hall, completely missed it.

  “I’m so sorry,” the girl moaned, stretching out on the sidewalk, her mass of hair-sprayed blonde hair covering her face, which rested on the cement. Her legs were splayed out behind her, giving passersby a glimpse of her green satin panties.

  I tried not to inhale, holding my breath as my eyes raced between the passed out girl at my feet and the ruined state of my brand new Doc Marten boots. I looked up helplessly to my mother, who was just starting to understand that she had missed something dramatic at the curb. My father ordered the boy, green in complexion and looking for an escape hatch in the squares of the sidewalk, to help his girlfriend: Now!

  It was my first five minutes of college. And it was a befitting welcome.

  ***

  Wyndham Hall was a three-story building that, despite the ivy clinging to the side, lacked any real character. From the street, you had to climb sixteen cement steps to get inside, which was even more disappointing than the exterior. Painted a drab, Institution Blue, the cinder block walls were covered with hand-made flyers announcing futons, used textbooks, and off-campus parking spots for sale. Girls were rushing by me, hauling suitcases, pillows, and favorite stuffed animals up the stairs and down the halls, while worried and tearful parents looked on. I pretended not to notice the crinkling of noses as I entered the building, the stench of drunk girl hurl emanating from my soaked boots. Against the wall on the right, two nondescript sorority sister types in ponytails and Gap t-shirts sat behind a folding table, matching names to room numbers. A neon orange poster board sign was taped to the edge of the table. In carefully stenciled letters, it read: “Welcome to The Pit!”

  The Pit. The first floor of Wyndham Hall was given this charming nickname because it was essentially the basement level of the building. My room was number 107, down the left-hand corridor. Pipes of varying diameter snaked along the walls and ceilings, carrying the whoosh of water rushing throughout the aging building. They, too, were painted the drab blue in an attempt to mask their presence. There was one pay phone in each lobby; each wing had one hall phone. It was the fall of 1990, a time before the cell phone, and we girls down in The Pit were going to have to learn to share.

  “Where is the bathroom?” I asked quickly of the girls at the table.

  “Your name?”

  “Greer Bennett,” I answered impatiently. “Seriously, where’s the bathroom?”

  “Do you smell something?” one asked the other. The girls sniffed in unison and made the same, twisted, “it smells like puke in here” face.

  “It’s me,” I growled at them. “Some girl just threw up all over me outside.”

  “Oh God!” they squealed, quickening the pace. “Down the hall! On your left, after the study lounge!”

  I was halfway there before they finished directing.

  Ten minutes later, barefoot and smelling like industrial strength liquid soap, I was back at the table in the foyer. My belongings were piled up near my mother’s feet in the corner; all but my Docs, which were sadly sitting on the bottom of a dumpster out back. My father was absent, helping the boy in the shorts carry the hung-over girl back to her sorority house a block away.

  “It looks like your roommate has already checked in,” I was told by one of the girls behind the table as she checked her list and issued me a scrap of paper with my room lock combination.

  I knew little about my new roommate, except that her name was Molly Maloney and she was from Texas. Months earlier, I had filled out a little form with my roommate preferences. Still a bit disappointed with myself for choosing the path of least resistance and lower tuition bills, I requested they pair me with someone who hailed from somewhere other than New Hampshire. I was, after all, attending school where most of my fellow, college-bound high school graduates found themselves, as well. With more than ten thousand potential new friends on campus, I’d be damned if I was going to spend another four years with the likes of them. I had no idea about people from Texas.

  That’s not entirely true. In my small life in small town New Hampshire I had encountered two other Texans. The first was a man named Beau Zwirble. He was a large, former high school football hero who, in all my memories of him, was always smiling. He married a Georgia beauty queen and removed her from her life as a Southern Belle in Atlanta, placing her and their four young daughters back down in a modest Tudor-style home in my childhood neighborhood. He and my dad were the only two men in the neighborhood who had gone to big football schools; they had a standing wager of one case of Budweiser whenever Texas A&M played the University of Miami. Beau and Taffy Zwirble were social friends of my parents and liked to host big, “Texas Style” barbecues in their backyard. Beau wore a meticulously clean apron that said “Macho Man” and served up enormous platters of charred meat that the neighborhood men went primal for. Taffy wore heels and perfectly applied makeup, and supervised her daughters while they learned the fine art of entertaining a brood of loud, obnoxious, and mostly drunk men as well as their slightly uptight New England wives.


  The other Texan was the mother of Rhonda Smalley, my best friend in fifth grade. Mrs. Smalley was an Amazon of a woman, who chain smoked Merits and left the housekeeping to the maid. I have one clear memory of her, from a night spent sleeping over. Rhonda and I walked into their family room to find both her parents in matching Lazyboys, lit cigarettes dangling from their fingers. Mr. Smalley balanced a Michelob on his right knee, while Mrs. Smalley swirled her long, right index finger through the Texas-shaped ice cubes in her vodka and tonic. They were watching a Jane Fonda exercise video, and laughing.

  At any rate, I was eager for my parents to leave me to myself and my new life. It was nothing personal. They had done their job, and gotten me out of their house and into a reputable state university with a mostly sensible head on my shoulders. I figured the rest was up to me.

  ***

  My first dorm room was the largest I ever saw at the university. It was a basic box, about fifteen feet square, with an open closet on each side of the door. There were two twin bed frames, with green plastic mattresses lying awkwardly on top. There were two each of identical desks, chairs, and chest of drawers. There was a black laminate tile floor, and two large windows that took up almost the entire wall opposite the door. On the unmade bed on the left side of the room lay a pile of backpacks, shopping bags, and red suitcases. There was also a leather saddle, riding crop, and a bridle. But no roommate.

  After my parents had helped me unload the last of my stuff, and slipped a hundred bucks into my pocket for a new pair of boots, I showered and quickly set to work unpacking, wanting to put some personality in the room before the blandness drove me mad. I carefully arranged my new Laura Ashley bed-in-a-bag to perfection. The purple and yellow floral print fought valiantly against the blue cinder block walls, but I was not finished. I unrolled my poster of Albert Einstein, the one that said, “Gravitation cannot be held responsible for people falling in love,” and hung it at a 30 degree angle above my bed. I overlapped the bottom corner of that poster with my worn movie poster of Gone With the Wind, the one I had picked up at a tacky tourist trap in Hollywood on a family vacation. My stereo went on top of the dresser, along with a foot-tall cardboard cutout of James Dean in the famous Rebel pose.

  Just as I unloaded the last white plastic milk crate of Ritz crackers and Cup-a-Noodles, Molly Maloney burst into the room like a mosquito shot from a cannon. I had no idea Texans came that tiny, and I am only five foot three. She could not have weighed more than ninety five pounds, soaking wet and holding a bag of bricks. A red bandana, rolled tightly, held back her shoulder length, medium brown hair. Her blue eyes were set close together. She looked like a little mouse wearing a grungy, oversized t-shirt and cutoff jeans. Her red canvas sneakers were filthy, and I noticed right away the dirt she tracked in on the matte black floor.

  “Oh my God!” she cried in a high-pitched drawl. “You’re here! I was wonderin’ when you’d be arrivin’!”

  I am a New Englander, born and bred, accustomed to the reserved nature of people descended from Puritans and Pilgrims. I had never encountered someone as open as Molly Maloney. She at once repelled and endeared herself to me.

  Behind the tiny Texan were two boys, equally as dirty as my new roommate, but far less repellant. One was an ordinary, dark-haired Irish kid, whose name I forget now; I only saw him a handful of times after that first day. The other boy was named Ben, and made me blush just by making eye contact when he said hello.

  Ben was tall, tanned, and fit, with eyes the color of the Caribbean ocean. His brown hair hung in loose waves to about jaw level, and he smiled wide, easy smiles that could melt butter. Though it took me another year or so to name what made him so intriguing, Ben oozed sex appeal. He had the tanned, toned body of a life of privilege. Summers spent at the beach, ski vacations in the winter.

  At age eighteen, I had yet to experience boys in any way other than theoretical. I had snubbed high school boys for the non-threatening fantasies of movie stars and musicians, and wrapped myself in a cocoon of aloofness to walk the halls of high school. Now here was a very real boy in front of me, and all I could think to say was, “Hi.”

  The two were helping Molly carry a couple of large boxes into the room. I stood by, watching silently as the three unpacked Molly’s Macintosh. In those days, a roommate with a computer was a huge score. It meant not having to sweat it out at the computer cluster in the basement of the Student Union Building, affectionately known as The SUB by those on campus. She even had a printer.

  Molly chatted relentlessly the entire time.

  “And so, I just closed my eyes, and just prayed those ropes were tight, and then I was hangin’, just hanging out there, with these gigantic mountains all around me. I’ve never been so scared in all my life!”

  She laughed a loud laugh that sounded like a hiccup, tossed her saddle to the floor from her bed, and flopped down.

  “And the hike up Mount Washington was just something else,” she sighed, proudly showing me the oozing scab on her left knee. “I am so glad I came up a week early, even though it was hard to leave home. Freshman Camp was definitely worth it,” she continued to me on one breath.

  I nodded and smiled and wondered what the hell I had gotten myself into. First puke, and now camping? Could it get any worse?

  “And just wait til you meet the rest of the gang! Right guys? Man, they’re all just crazy!”

  When the computer was unpacked and arranged on her desk, Molly asserted that she could, indeed, hook it up herself. Ben and the other one stood to leave. The dark-haired kid ducked his head and made a beeline for the door. Ben walked to my dresser, looked at the cutout of James Dean, then back to me.

  “Nice meeting you,” he said with a smile. I felt my face flare red, but I managed a smile in return.

  “Good luck with everything,” he continued, shooting a glance at my new roommate, who was busy pawing through her giant red leather duffle bag. Her head was hardly visible. I said “Bye,” to the boys, and pretended to busy myself with organizing my desk drawers. They almost made it out the door, free and clear. Almost.

  “What are y’all doing for dinner?” Molly called after the boys just as Ben stepped out into the hallway. The two of them froze. And that is when I noticed it. They didn’t like her. They felt bad for her, but they didn’t like her. I wonder what my story would be had they kept walking?

  ***

  As I have already mentioned, I grew up in a small town in the great Granite State. But before anyone goes jumping to fantasies of white steeple churches and jagged mountain notches, I’ll have you know Preston, NH is only about 35 miles north of Boston.

  At age eighteen, I was far more familiar with the Prudential building than the Old Man of the Mountain. I preferred hiking Harvard Square to the Appalachian Trail. A day spent in the great outdoors involved a paperback around my best friend’s swimming pool.

  I had the kind of charmed childhood that produces accountants and lawyers. Neighborhood block parties, gymnastics, little league softball, and family vacations to Orlando and Williamsburg, Virginia. Slumber parties, Girl Scout cookies, and church every Sunday. I was the girl who, in the middle of all that Americana bliss, read Bukowski and Kerouac, and dressed in head to toe black.

  My mother loves movies, especially the old black and whites from the days before the summer blockbuster. She named both my brother and me after movie stars whom kids of our generation had never heard. My brother, Cooper, was named for Gary Cooper. She named me for her favorite actress, Greer Garson.

  On a cold day in January, at recess in the fourth grade, Danny Keller was feeling like bullying someone.

  “Here comes Greer the Queer!” he called out, cackling in that way only grade school bullies know how.

  Luckily, I had a dad who encouraged my inner tomboy. I balled up my little fist and knocked Danny Keller flat on his ass. Gave him a bloody nose, and made him cry. To this day, I’m not sure how my brother kept the kids from calling him “Pooper.”

&nb
sp; Somewhere in the middle of my sophomore year of high school, I decided to drop the punk rock thing. My best friend, Penny, and I started playing tennis. We shopped at Gap. I even bought a pair of penny loafers. I used dimes in place of pennies. I kept reading Bukowski and Kerouac.

  I always envisioned college like the brochure claimed. Rolling green lawns, brick academic buildings with clock towers, students playing Frisbee or studying under a tree. I envisioned long, deep conversations about the world, midnight coffee runs, and long stretches at the library with my nose in some classic or another.

  I chose the school for its English department and the assurance of a free ride. Not from a scholarship or anything promising like that, but from my parents. If I chose the state school, I would be student loan-free in four years. They even promised a car after two years in good standing.

  Besides, the brochure featured a nice photo of students playing Frisbee in the shade of the clock tower on the rolling green lawn

  .

  .

  ***

  Maybe I should have skipped dinner that first night at school. I could have introduced myself to some of the other girls in The Pit, ordered a pizza, and gone over my class schedule. But I just had to see Ben again.

  The dining hall in our section of campus was like something out of an Ayn Rand novel: big, utilitarian, and impersonal. It was representative of a rush to accommodate more students in the seventies, built into a hill, with long ramps winding around each side of the building. Inside, you chose from the lesser of two lines, and wound yourself through a maze of ropes. You handed your student ID to a glorified lunch lady, who sat higher than the students in a cube of Plexiglass, for authorization to dine upon such delicacies as “chickwiches” and “spicy spinach tofu triangles.”