Draper Hall was one of the oldest dorms at Western Michigan University. Through my freshman and sophomore years, it was a safe place for me, and in my junior year, I won a coveted position there as a residence hall assistant (RA). Mike knew how badly I wanted the position and sent me a dozen yellow roses when I got the news. I increasingly recognized what a special guy he was—the kind that older ladies would ask to carry their groceries or the Girl Scouts would target for a big purchase. It was clear he derived great pleasure from helping someone in need. On more than one occasion, my mother would say about him, “Now that’s a real gentleman, just like your father.”
When my mom and I pulled up to the dorm that fall, Mike met us at the car, yanked open the door, leaned in, and gave me a kiss. The smell of English Leather filled the space as I rubbed my hand over the back of his head, appreciating that he’d grown out his blond buzz cut for me. Whether it was acquiescing to my preferred hair style for him, wearing a particular piece of clothing I liked, or forfeiting a night at a basketball game to attend a concert with me, he did it all with a buoyant good nature, eager to make me happy.
“Really, Carol,” he said laughing, as he started to unload all my junk stuffed in the car—suitcases, throw rugs, waste-paper baskets, a stereo, table lamps, and racks of hang-up clothes draped in plastic—“Are you sure you brought enough?” He threw his arms around me and held me close. I leaned into him and enjoyed how calming it was to rest my head on his chest. We stood apart and held hands—eyes locked—savoring the moment. This would be the year we found out where things would go.
I ran ahead, got the key to my room, and learned that orientation for the staff would start later that evening. Once I got all the info, I returned to the car, kissed my mother on the cheek, and said a quick goodbye. Mike made repeated trips to my room, taking two boxes at a time up the four flights of stairs. Moving-in day was the only time guys were allowed on the floor. As an RA, I had a simple suite of two rooms: one room for sleeping, the other for studying. The whole space, even the furniture, smelled musty after being closed up for the summer, so I opened both windows and let the fresh air in. I was grateful my mother had helped me shop for bright orange and yellow throw rugs that brought much-needed color to the space.
Setting down the last box, Mike lifted me into the air. “I’m really proud of you,” he said.
I was proud, too. Here I was at nineteen, with a fabulous guy, a great new job, and my tuition paid for. My life felt ideal. I started Western in a two-year secretarial course with career aspirations of being a receptionist. All resources for college in my family were focused on my older brother’s chance to attend a great school, and it wasn’t until the June I was about to graduate from high school that explorations began regarding my options. I had assumed college was for people like him who came out of the womb reciting their ABC’s and knew from elementary school they wanted to be analytical chemists or physics professors.
I had abandoned the secretarial program for a four-year degree as a sophomore so I could join a sorority, and while I still didn’t know what I wanted to be, there was more time to figure it out. I was also happy and relieved that Mike and I were getting more serious, leading me to believe marriage could be a possibility if things continued. He was crazy about me and often said so. And it felt especially wonderful that my new job as an RA would provide financial relief. I’d had to pay for college with my summer jobs, since my parents could only provide minor support. This appointment would now leave me some spending money. After he left, I sat down on the couch and imagined sitting with students as they brought me their problems and I dispensed the wisdom acquired over almost two decades of life.
As the new freshmen arrived a few days later, I sat in my room and waited. Bright colored posters with my name and room number hung in the hall so they could easily find me. Soon there was a tentative knock on my door, and a young girl with streaked blond hair and intense blue eyes peeked her head in. Her face was bright with rosy cheeks, and warmth spilled out of her like heat from an old wood stove. I liked her immediately. She introduced herself as Nicky and asked if I could help with her room key. I obliged and tailed her down the hall, taking notice of a cockiness in her step, how her jeans hung loosely on her hips and that her navy V-neck sweater looked like it was borrowed from a much larger person. Rather than shoes, she wore boots with cracked mud around the edges, the laces trailing on the floor as she walked—definitely a girl who wasn’t afraid to get dirty. Though she wore no makeup, she was striking without it.
I asked if her sweater belonged to her boyfriend. She replied that it was her father’s and that she’d wanted to bring a little bit of him with her. I could understand that and assumed she had a special relationship with her dad, just as I did.
She moved with her eyes toward the floor. Her energy, contained in spite of her swagger, emitted vibrations that were both shy and charismatic. We arrived at her door, and, after several tries, I was able to jiggle the lock enough to open it. Keeping the key, I promised to get her a new one by the end of the day. She thanked me and left the door ajar while she went back downstairs to unpack her parents’ car. I continued down the corridor and knocked on doors and introduced myself to the new students. The presence of thirty freshmen filled the floor—the jittery, frenetic energy of young girls feeling the first blush of freedom along with the terror that comes with the absence of boundaries.
After the first couple of weeks, everyone had settled in, and I grew accustomed to my new role, searching for ways to balance my responsibilities with my studies and my social life with Mike. Though most girls on my wing dropped in occasionally, only Nicky came to my room on a regular basis, most often in the evenings after dinner. At first we talked about the more mundane things at school, but soon we engaged in much deeper conversations, asking questions like “What is the purpose of life?” and “Where do we go when we die?” We would continue our dialogues during the day, taking long walks down by the railroad tracks across from North Campus, where we traipsed through the magical landscape of old tin cans, Coke bottles, and bits of trash folded into the weeds and wild flowers that sprouted up through the gravel between the ties.
Nicky would interrupt our conversations as we walked to share the names of different flowers, or stop abruptly to watch a toad or a garter snake peek out from the underbrush. Her ability to spot the movement of the smallest creatures inspired me to take greater notice of things in nature. As a biology major, she loved to explore the natural world; my major in sociology made me love to explore the human mind and emotions. These complementary interests led to conversations about the rights of animals and inquiries into which ones were smarter than people.
She was deeper than anyone I had met up to that point. Her questions were philosophical, her curiosity boundless—her desire to understand the world around her was compelling. Prior to our meeting, I had felt alone in thinking about the things we discussed and was hungry for this kind of conversation. Together, we created a space where we could be more fully ourselves than with anyone else, driven by an innocence and vulnerability that felt precious to me, even then.
One night she began a conversation with the question “What is love?”
I looked up and saw her face in a new way, noticing how beautiful her features were in the low light. I fixed my eyes on her hair, which hung over her right eye, and watched how she tossed her head and ran her fingers through it, pulling it behind her ear. It was a gesture I had seen many times before, but tonight it had a sensual quality. Her eyes were soft, her cheeks flushed. She fixed her gaze on mine, and we lingered longer than usual, neither wanting to look away. When my eyes did drop, I noticed the curve of her fingers as she smoothed the corner of a paper on my desk and how I wanted to take hold of her hand.
“What is love?” I repeated the question. She had a habit of striking matches while we talked and watching them burn. Just then, she lit one and held it in front of her face. We both watched the tiny fire in silence as it crept along the thin wooden stick till she blew it out just before it reached her fingers. It seemed like a metaphor for this moment. Something was on fire here for sure. Her gaze remained steady, and I imagined she asked that question for a reason—that it was possibly an invitation to talk about a feeling that was growing between us. The intensity enlivened and terrified me. I had thought about that question a lot before and wrote about love in my journals, but no one had ever asked me the question, and never a girl who was looking at me the way she was.
“I think love is a mystery. No one knows where it comes from, or why it ever leaves. It is more powerful than anything on earth, and yet we are totally dependent on someone else to give it to us.”
I stopped for a moment, picked up the matches, and struck one myself. We watched it glow as I went on. “You can’t create it or control it, and, while it is more valuable than anything else, you can’t buy it anywhere. It is given for free, and that is what makes it rare and precious.”
The fire had reached my fingers just as I finished my sentence, and I blew it out. My heart thumped in my chest, a metronome of warning, telegraphing memories from the past. Here it was again, this unbounded feeling of flying, this incessant desire to be closer, to fall into this invisible prism of light and color, to feel the touch of her hand on my skin.
I wondered in silence if she felt the same way—if she could not only see the flame but feel it. Her hands reached for the matches, and as she took them from me, I felt the slight brush of her fingers. It made me quiver. My mind flashed back to the sensual connection I felt with Gina, and I wondered if Nicky had had an experience like this before with another woman. The slow-motion quality of this conversation unfolding, along with the rush that came with the slightest physical touch, made me think there was intention behind her question.
“Have you ever been in love?” she asked.
I was afraid I was falling in love at this moment and that she could see it. “Yes, once.” I was not ready to admit I had been in love with a girl when I was fifteen, for fear I would scare her and myself. Gina and I had grown apart when she graduated high school half a year before me and got a job as a secretary. Going on to college, I was sure that had been a once-in-a-lifetime young-girl crush that was behind me. But, I could talk about the boy who broke my heart.
I told her about Charlie and how I thought he was someone special who turned out to be kind of a jerk. I reached into my desk drawer and pulled out photos of friends and family back home. I searched through the pile and held out the one picture I had of him.
“He’s very handsome,” she said, taking a long look at the photo.
“Yes, he was really gorgeous on the outside, but in the end not so much on the inside. In fact, I never really found out what happened. He just disappeared one day.” I didn’t want to talk about Charlie. I wanted to stay in the feelings I had right now with Nicky. “What about you?” I asked.
“That conversation would require more time,” she said, as she yawned and slowly got up from her chair. I came around to the other side of the desk as she reached out her arms to hug me goodnight. For a second I let my face rest next to hers and feel how smooth it was. We stood there for what seemed like ten minutes, though I am sure it was only seconds. It was thrilling leaning in to her body—so closely pressed together I could feel the beat of her heart. Yet, it wasn’t just physical; it was an experience of knowing someone better than I had known anyone. I felt like I was holding love itself in my arms, and I didn’t want to let go.
I closed the door behind her, leaned back against it, and silently murmured to myself, “Oh my God, not this again.” I got into bed and closed my eyes but couldn’t sleep—images of Nicky kept appearing, each of us fixated on the match in her fingers burning down, feeling the heat and wondering what was going to happen next.
These feelings of intense attraction were launched, and I couldn’t stop them; nor could I quell the anxiety they generated. I had thought I was over this. Charlie had convinced me that I was normal, and my attraction to Mike was reassuring. But this hunger was wild, racing—an out-of-control desire to be right up next to Nicky. No doubt somewhere in our shared unconscious there was a craving to be closer physically in a way that matched our growing feelings of mental and emotional connection. At first we met it through athletic competitions, chasing each other outside and wrestling ourselves to the ground—disguising sexual attraction with physical play.
One night, this contact expanded to a softer version when Nicky offered to give me a massage after I complained of a sore back.
“Come on,” she said, as she pushed me toward my bed in the other room. “Lie down. I’m really good at this.”
Without resisting, I agreed and carefully took off my shoes and placed them beneath the bed before I lay down on my stomach fully clothed in my corduroy Levis and cable-knit sweater. She sat on the bed next to me, and I could feel her hip lean into mine as she bent over my back and pressed her hands down on my shoulders, releasing the knots. Even through my thick sweater, I could feel both the strength and tenderness of her fingers and the sweetness of her touch.
“Why don’t you take this off?” she said, yanking on my top after ten minutes of earnest but fruitless effort. “The knots in your back are really bad, and I can’t get at them through your sweater.”
Raising myself up, I pulled it off over my head and tossed it on the chair across from the bed. After I was facedown again, Nicky climbed up on top of me and sat on my backside, her legs straddling my body.
“That’s better,” she said, as she started at the top of my back and lightly pulled her fingertips across the bare skin of my torso till they reached the edge of my belt. Then she leaned forward and gripped my shoulders with both hands and pushed at the knots with her thumbs repeatedly until they softened. She then worked her knuckles into my upper back, kneading the tissue from top to bottom. She repeated this same pattern for about twenty minutes.
“Is it okay if I push into you with my elbows?”
I nodded, uncertain what she meant but willing to find out.
Slowly, she placed the points of her elbows into my shoulders and then gently lowered her body onto mine, her elbows sliding to the sides, until I sensed her full weight pushing into me, felt her breath on my neck and her hair sweep across my shoulders. She was so close that I could smell the freshness of the Irish Spring soap she used. It was like a dream in slow motion as she raised herself up and again smoothed her hands across my back in soft even strokes—our blended energies swirling between us. I wondered if she could feel my pulse racing or the electrical currents that sped down my arms and legs, making me light-headed. Alternating emotions of ecstasy and panic were followed by the profoundly unsettling awareness that I shouldn’t be feeling this way.
Silently, I reassured myself that this was okay, that we weren’t doing anything wrong—it was just a massage. My musings were interrupted by a loud knock on the door that startled us both. Nicky jumped off of my back as I quickly reached for my sweater and pulled it on over my head.
“Just a minute!” I shouted, fearful that the person would walk right in and wonder what was going on. Smoothing my hair, I went to the door and opened it just enough to peek my head out. “Hi, Betsy,” I said. “What do you need?”
“Have you seen Nicky? She was going to help me with my biology homework.” Nicky hadn’t mentioned anything about it.
“Yeah, sure—as a matter of fact, she’s in here.” I tried to sound nonchalant as I turned toward the other room and called out, “Hey, Nicky—Betsy’s looking for you.”
Nicky emerged from my bedroom with a sheepish grin on her face, walked past me, and said, “Want to meet for lunch tomorrow?”
“Sure,” I responded, as she joined Betsy in the hall. “Have fun, you guys.”
I closed the door and rested my hand on the knob. My heart was still drubbing wildly. I turned out the light in my study and lay back down on my bed with one hand on my chest and the other on my stomach, hoping to calm the surge of wild sensations. The scent of Irish Spring still floated in the room. What did it mean to feel this fierce attraction to her? Was there something wrong with me? Did she feel this way too? I didn’t want to dwell on any of it, but the thoughts and feelings were too powerful to ignore. I tossed and turned with them most of the night.
It seemed that we had made another step that night toward greater acknowledgment of the invisible force field surrounding us. And though I was certain both of us felt it, neither of us could speak it. One part of me was grateful Christmas break was a few days away so we would have some time apart to calm the constant rush of feelings that cascaded between us. Another part of me wished that Nicky were coming home with me for the holiday instead of Mike. That thought really scared me, because I knew it should be the other way around.