Orientation
Ahandsome, towheaded boy met us with a clipboard as we entered the campus gates. The grounds were lush and manicured, and the air was refreshingly crisp. Nathaniel Buxton University transcended the August heat, and the cool air that spilled through the open car windows left goose bumps on our arms and legs.
We looked like the Griswolds with the full-sized storage box on top of the station wagon and our carload of frowning faces. I could see the boy grimace as Daddy awkwardly put out his left hand (the good one) to say, “I’m Zane Piper, young man.”
“Bo Hagerty, student council vice president,” he responded before glancing in to pick me out of the group.
“Brought the whole family with you?” he said with a half grin, his straight white teeth standing out against his tan skin. He looked as if he had spent the summer on a beach.
He scanned down his list until he found my name. “You’re on the third floor of Tully, Miss Piper.” Then he pointed the way around the bend to the freshman dormitory.
“Thank you,” I called from the backseat, but he was already talking to the inhabitants of a sleek Range Rover that had pulled up behind us. (He was so not South Carolina!)
“Bo Hagerty is Beauregard,” I said to Dizzy with a thump on her knee as we made our way around the bend. We had always been able to find a common ground when it came to good-looking boys.
“If you like the preppy, stuck-up type,” she said, still licking her wounds from the Exxon episode. She seemed envious of my pending escape.
“Look at it this way, Diz: you and Lou will have the whole backseat to yourselves on the way home. You could practically stretch out and sleep.”
She shrugged, then couldn’t help but gawk at the beautiful green campus that opened up before us, its weeping willows and oaks waving us in. NBU was on the edge of the quaint valley town of Troutville, and beyond the campus gates and the three-block town, there were rolling hills with pastoral vistas of barns and silos and cows grazing on patches of emerald. Rising up above the hills were the colossal Blue Ridge Mountains that surrounded us as far as the eye could see.
Daddy lifted his hand out the window to feel the cool air.
“Isn’t this something, girls?”
Mama cooed in agreement as we passed the colonnade and the quadrangle with its bright red bricks and Corinthian columns. A bearded professor in a stereotypical tweed jacket stopped to chat with a circle of students who were tossing a hacky sack. And a girl with a golden retriever at her feet napped on a rocking chair in the center of the quad.
“Adelaide, I think these mountains are like wise sages calling you to learn, baby!” Daddy said.
“I guess so,” I said with a chuckle. He was poetic in a Geechee sort of way, and so I had him to thank for that gene.
“This ought to be an incentive to get those grades up, Dizzy,” he added. It was an untimely remark that hit below the belt.
Dizzy flicked a Nabs wrapper onto the floorboard and rolled her eyes. At this rate, she’d be lucky to get into Myrtle Beach Technical College, and we all knew it.
“Don’t hold your breath, Daddy dearest.”
Thankfully, I knew my roommate, Ruthie Baxter from Gastonia,
North Carolina. We had shared a cabin together at Camp Greystone a few summers in a row and had set out to room with each other when we found out we had both been accepted.
And good old beauty queen Jif had gotten her wish: she had been plucked from the NBU waiting list and would forgo her Clemson scholarship to join me in the class of 1993.
Now another strapping upperclassman with his hair pulled back in a ponytail, of all things, met us at the steps of the dormitory and helped Daddy carry in the luggage. This place is extremely organized, I thought as the Range Rover pulled in behind us and another boy ran out to grab its belongings.
Out of the corner of my eye, I could see some sort of demonstration going on at the rear of the quadrangle. I saw a map that read “Beijing,” and a gravestone that read “For the thousands killed in Tiananmen Square,” and thousands of plastic forks were sticking up from the ground with different names inscribed on them. Where is Tiananmen Square, anyway? I thought to myself. I had become so engrossed in my literature that I was certainly not up on current events. It must be somewhere in Asia.
Intimidation crept up on me like a rash. Was I already in over my head? Was I country-come-to-town even in my first hour on campus?
I had to remember that just because I was near the top of my class in Williamstown didn’t mean my chops were up to some of the sharpest kids from around the country.
Upperclass girls from the NBU Student Wellness Committee greeted me at the foyer with a pink care package that included bubble gum, Band-Aids, Tylenol, an instruction manual about how to check for breast cancer, and, much to my shock, a pack of condoms. There was a floral notice taped to them that read “Practice safe sex! Come See Ms. Eugenia in the health clinic if you need birth control pills” on one side and “A health and wellness seminar will be held in the Tully lounge on Friday at 4:00 p.m.” on the other.
Daddy’s eyes met mine as I peered up from the bag. I could tell he was weighing his words carefully before he spoke. “Now, Adelaide, you’re going to be exposed to a lot of outlandish ideas up here, you know?”
“I sure hope so,” I said, unable to fully sense his anxiety over shelling out thousands of dollars to a place that already threatened his daughter’s innocence. “I mean, that’s why I’m here, right?”
Meanwhile, someone had mistaken Dizzy for a freshman and handed her a pink bag too. She pulled out the condoms in great delight, waved them between Daddy and me, and said, “Guess you’re not in Kansas anymore, big sis!”
Daddy grabbed the bag from Dizzy with his metal pinchers and threw it into the trash can at the bottom of the stairwell. Then he gently grabbed my shoulders with his hands (one metal, one bone) and said, “We’re trusting you to keep your head on, sister.”
“Yes, sir,” I assured him. “I’ve kept it on so far, and I’m not about to lose it now.”
He nodded in relief and patted my back. Just behind him Dizzy was making a gagging gesture and pointing to a sign with rainbows and pink triangles that read, “Harmony, the NBU Gay and Lesbian Society, welcomes you to our campus.”
She came over and whispered, “I’ll tell Papa Great they have a society for you.”
I rolled my wide eyes. Even her teasing couldn’t stop the gnawing that had begun in my gut. I was overwhelmed by the new names and faces; the boys cut out of granite, lugging my belongings up three flights of stairs; and the talk of politics and sex at every turn. Was someone burning incense? I peered into an open dorm room where a girl and a guy were smoking cloves and tapping their feet to a folksy-sounding song. There was a black tapestry over the window, with a picture of a grinning skeleton wearing a top hat, and it blocked out the afternoon sunlight.
Suddenly I was afraid to climb the three flights of stairs to my new home. I stood at the bottom of the stairwell as if paralyzed and watched my family clomp up ahead of me. Was I up for this? Should I run back to the University of South Carolina and beg them to return my scholarship? Cousin Randy, here I come! Football, cockfighting— don’t start without me!
Dizzy looked back and then ran back down and squeezed my elbow.
“You can do this, Ad,” she said. “You’ve been waiting your whole life for this.” I looked my sister in the eye and bit my bottom lip to ward off the fear. When she offered her arm, I took it and held it all the way up the cold concrete stairs.
The cinder-block walls in my dorm room seemed gray and sad. Twenty-six thousand dollars a year in tuition for cinder-block walls? Ruthie and I had coordinated our room in a soothing periwinkle and white, and Mama had made some adorable curtains that she draped around our one and only window to brighten the place up. After we frantically hung posters and pictures and piled notebooks and pens on our little wooden desks, the room warmed up a little. Mama, Dizzy, and Lou spent time fussing over the organization of my closet drawers, racing to get me settled before the convocation ceremony, while Ruthie hung pictures around the room of prom and college parties she and her boyfriend had attended together.
Ruthie’s hometown boyfriend, Tag Eisley, had come along with her parents to settle her in. Tag was a junior at the University of North Carolina, and Ruthie had already circled in red on her desk calendar all of the game weekends during which she would drive down to Chapel Hill to visit him. They had dated since her freshman year in high school. Now he and Daddy paced and bristled at the invitations to fraternity rush parties that upperclassman boys were handing out up and down the halls.
“Come on by tonight,” they would say as they slid the flyers under the doors.
Ruthie hugged Tag hard after crumpling each invitation and tossing it into the trash.
“I won’t be needing these,” she said.
Great, I thought. Ruthie’s going to be no fun.
A bulky upperclass girl named Beryl Dunlap dropped by to introduce herself as our small-group leader during orientation. She sported a yellow men’s polo tucked into red plastic workout pants. Out of her crinkly-sounding pocket, she pulled a flyer for some kind of athletic team tryout.
“Play lacrosse?” she asked.
Huh? Never heard of it.
“I don’t think so,” I told Beryl, who had been playing ever since her sophomore year at Miss Porter’s.
“I’ll pick you ladies up in an hour and a half and escort you to the convocation,” she said. “It is best,” she announced to all parents, “if you say your good-byes before then.”
Tears filled Mama’s eyes when Daddy said, “It’s time, Greta.” She put the last sweater neatly in my drawer and could not even look me in the eye to bid me farewell. I reached across the threshold and hugged her. “It’s okay, Mama. I love you, too, and I’m going to be just fine. Don’t worry.”
“You’ll go to the cafeteria and eat something after convocation,” she urged. “It’s open until seven fifteen.”
“Yes,” I said. “I’ll do it.”
“I saw the menu,” she said. “They’re going to have lasagna and green-bean casserole, and the salad bar looks really fresh. And I left you some tomatoes in your minifridge and even some leftover Mexican casserole that I brought up in the cooler, and there’s a microwave down the hall by the lounge.”
“I’ll eat. It’s a primary need. Don’t fret.”
I could tell that she just didn’t know what to say or what physical gesture to give to express the joy and sadness this moment brought to her. I guessed that she was thinking of every diaper she had changed, every runny nose she had wiped, every multiplication table she had called out, and every science project she had stewed over, and now she could hardly bear the rite of passage that was before her firstborn.
I kissed her on the cheek. “Mama, I’ll be okay.”
Though Lou didn’t fully understand what was going on, she knew enough to hold my hand tightly all the way down the steps and out the dorm to the station wagon. Dizzy understood exactly what was happening, but she had more pressing issues to attend to.
“I’m starving,” she called to Mama and Daddy as she puckered in the mountain air and reapplied her jet-black lipstick. “Can we stop at that Hardee’s on the way to the highway?”
“Yes,” Daddy said in a hushed tone, while Mama wiped her eyes with his handkerchief.
After a last farewell, I watched as the wagon drove out of the Tully dorm parking lot and over the speed bumps that led down the hill and to the tall brick gates of Nathaniel Buxton University.
“Good-bye,” I said to myself, and I was surprised by the lump in my own throat.
“C’mon, Adelaide!” Ruthie called from our dorm-room window. She was already in a church dress with her hair in a French braid. “Convocation starts in twenty minutes!”
The NBU convocation was held in the stone chapel in the center of the colonnade on the top of the great green hill. The college president, Dr. Neil G. Schaeffer, addressed us from an opulent mahogany pulpit that seemed miraculously suspended in the air, eye level with the balcony.
Jif, Ruthie, and I were on the left side of the floor-level aisle with members of the class of 1993 surrounding us. We lifted our chins up toward the pulpit to hear the speech.
“The mission of NBU is to cultivate intellectual growth in its students in a setting that stresses both the importance of individual honor and integrity and the responsibility to serve humanity through the productive use of one’s education,” he said without looking down at his notes. He was a tall, stately man about the age of Papa Great. His deep-set eyes had a way of looking into a student’s core, and his facial expressions and hand motions were confident and controlled.
Honor. Integrity. Serving humanity. Now, these were words I could get inspired by, I thought as I gave a peripheral glance at the members of the class of 1993. A lean, buff brunette to my left tilted her head to ponder the notion, and a peculiar boy to my right was snorting loudly every few seconds as though he had a nervous tic. Could someone get that poor guy a Kleenex? As I thumbed through my purse to see if I had one, President Schaeffer continued. When I looked up, he was singling me out with his black eyes.
“How will you take advantage of this opportunity, scholars?”
My purse dropped to the stone floor when he said that. I loved being labeled a scholar, and I wanted to hear more.
“Will you join the archaeological dig that Dr. Weston is leading in Mexico this summer? Will you run for a position on the school judiciary committee that enforces the honor code and a no-tolerance policy for cheating and plagiarism? Will you serve at the Troutville soup kitchen on Saturday mornings or take a biological study trip with Professor Ereckson to the Galápagos Islands? How about our award-winning Shenandoah Valley Review ? Will you help Dr. Hirsch with the selection of poetry and essay submissions?”Yes! Yes! Yes! I was saying to all of his questions as he continued to single students out with his stare. My heart was racing, and I looked around to see if everyone else was as exhilarated as me, but most folks seemed to be staring dully at the altar.
I started tapping my foot with excitement, but Jif squeezed my knee as if to say, “Get a grip,” though I could tell that she was stirred, too, at all the possibilities of how the four years before us would unfold.
After President Schaeffer concluded his address and made a regal trot down the steps of the pulpit, taking his place behind the altar, the dean of student life, Dr. Josephine Atwood, addressed us about what was in store over the next two days of orientation, and I took another moment to survey the class of three hundred freshmen.
Jif, Ruthie, and I were by far the most dressed up in the group. We had on bright makeup and church skirts, and we had donned pink-and-purple-colored pumps and carried purses that matched our tops. Almost all the guys were in khakis, some form of casual loafer, and a wrinkled oxford shirt. The girls were in tight-fitting earth-colored blouses and either pants or miniskirts that showed off their impressive figures. They had lean, muscular arms and tight calves as though they had been training for a triathlon.
As hard as it was to get to NBU, I was surprised at how attractive most of these people were. I would have expected them to look more bookwormish. Not all of these suntanned, straight-teethed preppies. Beauty and brains—Renaissance folks, I supposed. I really was in over my head.
It was dusk when we filed out the arched chapel doors and into the crisp mountain air. We were at the highest point on campus, and the sun was setting behind the first mountain peaks against a backdrop of orange and pink. Beyond it were the little ridges of blue that fanned out around us farther than the eye could see.
As the mass shuffled down the colonnade and turned toward the quadrangle behind it, I tried once again to make out the group. There were side conversations all around me, and it seemed as though many of the freshmen knew one another. They chuckled and slapped hands and pushed each other down the stone path. Had they arrived the week before and made friends?
“Andover, right?” a stout but handsome boy said to another.
“Yeah. We slaughtered you in lacrosse last year,” the other said.
“Don’t remind me.”
Their accents were unfamiliar—such precise pronunciation that was sharply clipped at the end of each word. Northeastern, I supposed.
“Going out for the team?” the stout boy said to the other.
“You know it. And I’ll see you at the Sigma Alpha house tonight.”
“Yeah. I hear rush is one abuse after another. But hey, it’ll be our turn next year.”
Sigma Alpha? Fraternity, I guessed. (NBU had only started admitting women in 1983, and so there weren’t sororities yet.) And what was it with lacrosse? I had never heard of such a sport. In South Carolina it was football, football, football. There were a little basketball and a little baseball, but no mysterious game called lacrosse. Every time the word came up, I pictured a grumpy Frenchman.
“I’m from Westchester, New York,” I heard the beautiful brunette who’d sat next to me say to another lean girl with straight blonde hair that grazed her shoulder blades.
“Greenwich, Connecticut,” the other one said, pulling her hair back and twisting it into a knot. Thin little wisps formed around her perfectly proportioned face. “Want to get something to eat in town?”
“Yeah. And then let’s go to the Sigma Alpha house. This junior said they’re having a bash and to come by.”
They were so natural and attractive. Buff yet feminine, well-bred and, as I was already beginning to see, privileged as they scurried to their Jeeps and BMWs in the parking lot of the dorm.
Jif, who had a keener sense of style than me, gave me a worried face as she surveyed our outfits and big, curly hair. She put her hand over her mouth and tried to temper her Low-Country drawl. “We’ve got work to do, Adelaide.”
It would be two whole days until we registered for classes, and I knew she would whip herself into the subtle, sporty look in no time. She had the raw material to do it, but I wondered how Ruthie and I would fare.
But even though these folks were intimidating, I could not squelch the thrill of being immersed in the environment that President Schaeffer had just described. A place where honor was encouraged and justice was enforced. A place where learning was expected. This was just what I wanted, and I couldn’t wait to roll up my sleeves and dig in. Finally, I was beginning to feel that maybe I wasn’t born in the wrong place at the wrong time. There would be no Averill Skaggs lobbying for the cretins in this place.
The crowd parted at the tall bronze statue of Nathaniel Buxton in the center of the quadrangle as some headed toward the Randolph dorm and others to Tully.
Like Thomas Lynch Jr. from Williamstown, Nathaniel Buxton had been a signer of the Declaration of Independence and was considered a Founding Father. He served on the cabinets of both George Washington and John Adams, and he was one of the leading commanders of the ground troops during the Revolutionary War. His family and even his horse were buried on the cemetery hill beyond the colonnade. I’d seen a photo of his gravestone fenced in with wrought iron and dripping with wisteria in the application, and I planned to make a pilgrimage there before classes started.
Now his statue seemed to be looking down on us with a thoughtful stare as he held his battle gun in one hand and his coat in the other.
As the class of 1993 continued to move through the quad and into their dorms or automobiles, I wondered which one among them would be a Pulitzer prize winner in twenty-five years. Which one would be a senator or a Supreme Court justice? Which one would discover the cure for diabetes? Though most looked more like athletes than scholars, NBU had produced leaders who had influenced the country and the world, and each year they became more and more selective, so chances were these folks had something exceptional to offer.
“Who are these people?” I said to Jif and Ruthie as I spun around twice, embarrassing them both. I jumped up on the steps of the commerce school, made a clumsy arabesque, and shouted, “And where are they going?”
Jif acted as if she didn’t know me and made a beeline for Tully. Ruthie looked around at the other students chuckling at my accent.
“Get down, Adelaide!” she said through gritted teeth. She reached her arm up and pulled me off the steps.
“Nice hair,” a pudgy girl said with that clipped voice.
“And accent,” her tall waif of a friend added.