Elle couldn’t believe how demoralizing the Crothers Dormitory was. Her dorm room was less than half the size of her walk-in closet at home and had a low ceiling, dingy gray walls, and a tile floor of an undeterminable color. A solitary window provided the only light.
Elle looked at her watch and realized she was already late. She left her dorm room and the moving men who were grappling with how to wedge in at least three times the amount of clothing and personal items as the room was meant to hold, and drove hurriedly to orientation. She parked the Range Rover and considered what to do with Underdog.
“Sorry, precious,” Elle said, rubbing the dog’s head. “I’ll take care of this really fast and you can guard the car.” She poured Evian into his pink inflatable travel dish, cracked the windows, turned on his favorite Cole Porter CD, and blew him a kiss as she darted off.
The melee in the courtyard in front of Stanford Law School reminded her of the first day of summer camp. Groups of proud parents stood around cooing to their embarking prodigies, who brandished dreadful “Hello My Name Is” tags on their chests. Elle thought about her parents, who couldn’t bear to see her “wasting her talents at law school.” Second-year law students worked at tables hawking Stanford Law bumper stickers, T-shirts, sweatshirts, coffee mugs, pens, notebooks, backpacks, and shoelaces to eager buyers. Elle declined the opportunity to purchase Stanford Law paraphernalia and looked for an alphabetical line to guide her, but Stanford had a markedly different organization than civilized activities like sorority rush.
“If you went to Harvard, pick up your name tag here,” read the sign in front of a crowded table of students pushing each other to get their tags. “If you went to Brown,” a busy table of Euro wanna-bes beckoned, “pick up your name tag here.” The MIT/Cal Tech table was teeming with PowerBook-flourishing techies and Trekkies. The Smith table resembled a NOW convention of “Before” candidates for beauty makeovers. Elle approached the “State Schools, except Penn, which really is Ivy” table with a nervous glance, uncertain whether the University of Southern California actually counted as a state school. There was no name tag for her there.
Drifting past the sign for “Cornell, which is not really an Ivy,” Elle felt a creeping sense of horror. Maybe the acceptance letter had been a joke, a terrible mistake. At the far end of the swarm stood a single card table with the sign that she knew was meant for her alone.
“If you went to Santa Monica Community College for summer school, pick up your name tag here,” read a sign at a table so distant it was the equivalent of being seated by the kitchen at Lutece. Nobody was staffing this table, on which lay Elle’s lone sticker with her name and an orientation schedule anchored by a rock. “Very funny,” Elle said, blushing. She had passed her math requirement at Santa Monica but certainly didn’t count it as her alma mater. She shoved the hideous name tag into her Prada bag and departed quickly for a second row of tables.
Pushing past people from among whom Blackwell would have found it impossible to pick out the ten worst dressed, she found a relatively calm-looking woman who wasn’t accompanied by her parents or carrying a PowerBook, and asked her if she knew where she was supposed to go next.
“I don’t know.” The woman looked her up and down and gave an uninterested shrug. “I’m waiting for my fiancé.”
“Thanks.” Elle moved to a nearby table and surveyed its collection of pamphlets on date rape, drug and alcohol abuse, and sexual harassment. The table workers were also aggressively distributing brochures for psychiatric care at Stanford. A lengthy pamphlet on substance abuse among graduate students was shoved into Elle’s hand from the un-manicured clutches of a do-gooder.
Finally, making her way to an unoccupied wooden bench, Elle sat down to read her orientation schedule for the following day.
Tuesday:
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9:00 A.M.—10:00 A.M. |
Registration |
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10:00 A.M.—12:00 P.M. |
Book Purchase |
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12:00 P.M.— 1:30 P.M. |
Westward-Ho “Bar”-b-que |
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1:30 P.M.— 3:00 P.M. |
Campus Tour (including Law Library) |
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3:00 P.M.— 5:00 P.M. |
You and Others: Meet and Greet |
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5:00 P.M.— 7:00 P.M. |
Dean’s Welcome |
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7:00 P.M. |
Pizza Party, followed by “Bar” Revue |
“Barbaric,” Elle said and groaned. As if greasy pizza and a “Bar”-b-que, where they were likely to serve Sloppy Joes, weren’t bad enough, the schedule covered every minute of the day with law-themed activities. How could she even begin to color-code her closet (pinks first, of course) before classes began on Thursday? She thought of Underdog and decided to beat the scheduled book-purchase rush the next day and go straight to the bookstore.
Elle returned to the Range Rover, grabbed Underdog, and hurried to the bookstore. She located the Law section by approaching the already familiar crowd of beaming, chattering parents. While Stanford med students and engineers had their own bookstore on University Avenue, law books were sold on the bottom level of the campus bookstore, a dingy dungeon with a gray-lit stairwell and linoleum floors. Elle had naively thought that she would beat the long lines by arriving ahead of the preprinted schedule for book buying. No such luck: dozens of law students, eager to get an edge on their classmates, were staring lustfully at the casebooks they would soon own.
Elle gathered her unwieldy casebooks, twelve in all, thinking how inconvenient they would make vacation travel, and took her place behind yet another set of proud parents and a law student whose stiff demeanor and signature J. Press uniform of khakis, a white shirt, and a navy blazer left no doubt that he had gone to Yale and had never ventured outside of New Haven for shopping trips.
An MP3 player and sunglasses would have been a good call, thought Elle as she tried to ignore the student’s father loudly reminiscing about his days at Harvard Law. An MP3’s volume couldn’t have gone high enough to drown him out, not even if she had played Kid Rock. Elle soon learned that his name was actually Mr. Daniel Baxter III. Tripp, to his friends, as he was greeted by an old Princeton classmate whose pants were sprinkled with alligators and whose belt was embroidered with tiny Princeton crests. His daughter was starting Stanford undergrad, he told Mr. Baxter, with a hearty pat on the back and a quick mention of what he had shot at the club last week.
Baxter’s son, a poor imitation of his father and probably his grandfather before him, smiled and nodded at appropriate times as his father boomed his thoughts like a drill sergeant. “Anne, doesn’t this remind you of when we took Edward to Choate? And then Yale? A heavyweight rower and an all-American squash player!” Tripp Baxter broadcast, punching Edward on the shoulder. Elle’s classmate must not have been the first son, since his mother addressed him not as “Daniel” or even “Dan” but “Edward.”
Mr. and Mrs. Baxter weren’t buying sweatshirts or bumper stickers, and their haughty expressions revealed that they had as little in common with the sweatshirt buyers as with the linoleum floor beneath Mrs. Baxter’s bright yellow espadrilles.
Mrs. Baxter smiled at Edward and pushed him along, her eyes twinkling amid crow’s-feet and wrinkles that came from too much time on the tennis court without a visor. Elle realized with horror that Anne Baxter’s dress was a Lily Pulitzer almost exactly like the one Elle had purchased at Barneys after seeing it in the “What’s Hot” column in Allure. Squinting at the flamingo pink print, Elle made a mental note to start a Goodwill pile immediately.
“Edward,” his father began, “did I ever tell you about John Kaplan, a Harvard Law classmate of mine?” Tripp glanced down at his green-and-blue happy whale pants, a color eruption thankfully ending at his brown L.L. Bean shoes.
Ed’s mouth hung open and silent in what Elle saw as an indication that his thoughts were as dishwater-bland as his hair. But he didn’t have time to answer before his father regaled all but the deaf with the tale of the illustrious John Kaplan.
“He was brilliant! Or at least he used to be,” Mr. Baxter said after a pause, “before he left the East to teach at Stanford, if you can imagine,” he said between eruptions of laughter. “Well, anyway, you should have seen him at Harvard. We’d sit there in Professor Gluck’s class; boy, he could shake you up. And Kaplan…when he bothered to show up to class…would take absolutely no notes. Not a word! He just turned his back to the professor and stared at the wall. He never even bought his books, the rascal. But when he was called on, he’d give the correct answer along with such keen insight that even the professor was stunned. What a genius, that Kaplan!”
“Terrible what happened to him,” Anne said as she arranged her headband.
“Yes, terrible.” Ed’s father nodded sadly.
“What happened?” Ed asked, his voice tremulous.
“Terrible,” Elle said under her breath. And sadder still that with all of these casebooks, all of the reading she would have ahead of her, she would probably have to miss Conan O’Brien.
Elle pulled out Allure’s September issue and noisily turned the pages in an attempt to let Tripp Baxter know that he was interrupting important reading. Her annoyance went unnoticed, so there was no choice but to find out what tragic event had happened to John Kaplan.
“Well, one tragedy for you, Edward, is that he wrote your Criminal Law text,” his father said, laughing. Ed looked down over his overdeveloped chest at the enormous book with such tiny print that it should have come with a magnifying glass.
Elle glanced at Kaplan’s name on the red Criminal Law text that she was holding.
“He died at a very young age. Around fifty, I think,” Anne answered sadly, shooting a nasty look in her husband’s direction.
“If he never studied, how could he teach?” Edward said.
“Well, he found a way, I tell you,” Daniel Baxter III answered with a resounding boom.
Elle stepped out of line, deciding the moral of Kaplan’s story was that if he never even bought his books and still managed to become a professor, there was no need for her to worry about missing her regular manicure time, which would fall during Criminal Law.