Chapter Five

SWEAT RAN DOWN CHARLIE’S back. Feldman must have turned off the wonderfully raucous AC. Or maybe Gramp. Old people didn’t like the cold. Angelina said they were getting their bodies accustomed to heaven, where she assured Charlie that the balm of Hell rose up to heat the pearly clouds. Eighty-two degrees with a breeze. Entry to Heaven. Another reason to practice the Dignidad.

By now most of the parents had said their goodbyes, and the only people he saw passing his open door were groups of kids, hands in pockets, moving with a fake sense of purpose that reminded Charlie of 21 Jump Street, the undercover cops and their endless high school year. A few looked in as they passed at Charlie by his desk with his Move-in Day folder. So many pamphlets, so many solicitations, so many schedules. But not one of them was mandatory. No asterisks, except to indicate an added cost, like tomorrow’s Trivial Pursuit breakfast sponsored by the Law Club, or Friday night’s bus ride to Camden for an outdoor screening of Dirty Dancing.

He was tempted to ditch the big dreams of running away from Move-in Day and just be Charlie Green, freshman. A kid stuck in the late eighties, figuring stuff out. Ditch the blazer for a Penn hoodie like everyone else. Luxuriate in life’s perfectly acceptable averageness. Prince’s AIDS ballad “Sign o’ the Times” was blaring down in the courtyard, and an entire roll of cookie dough was being passed around the floor. It would be easy to ask the Lacrosse Girl if she’d seen Dirty Dancing. But doing what was easy—normal kid stuff—did not come easy to him. It was effortless enough when he was very little. When he’d wait all morning on the bench outside his mother’s room for their weekly walk in the park, for the ritual balloon purchase and a shared rainbow Italian ice. Those walks were euphoric for five-year-old Charlie. But when Angelina was hired, the walks ceased to be. For the first few months, Charlie continued to wait patiently outside his mother’s bedroom and its shut door, until finally conceding one awful morning that he would never again take a walk in the park with his wine-cursed mother.

Normal kids do as they’re told, the suckers. They sit on benches outside closed doors, for hours, just to end up heartbroken and alone. Life is a prison that needs to be escaped. He imagined a set of three skeleton keys, and named them Girls, Europe, and Vodka.

*

The name and number of his advisor, Victoria Pettibone, were written on his Move-in Day folder. They’d spoken on the phone, her voice young and bright. He’d thought about her since that conversation last month, from the telephone room at Camp Shining Star that doubled as the weigh-in center.

“Stop by anytime,” Miss Pettibone had said.

“Including Move-in Day?”

“The door will be open. If you’d like to bring your parents, feel free.”

“At my camp, the campers weigh themselves every Sunday, then call home. It can be a tough call.”

“I’m sure you’ve been an excellent counselor. Maybe there’s a sociology class that touches on your unique summer experience.”

“I don’t know about my classes.”

“We do have you, by default, in four introductory classes, but they don’t necessarily reflect your—”

“You should see how happy or sad some of the campers get when they step on the scale. It’s like life and death.”

“Hmm.”

Even over the phone, Charlie could tell that Miss Pettibone said Hmm to great effect. Almost as well as the old dandy, now deceased, who’d frequented Adam’s Rib and said Hmm after tasting wine to indicate that the bottle wasn’t to his liking. Apparently he was a writer, famous for being gay and southern. Charlie didn’t understand the appeal when his mother pointed him out, but then he overheard him saying Hmm to the coat check girl when she couldn’t locate his scarf. By the time she found it rolled into the arm of another overcoat, the manager had bought him his dinner.

“Chaplin, they’ve moved the hacky sack mixer to College Green.” Feldman had reappeared, leaning against the open door, taking notes on his clipboard. “Strongly recommend making an appearance. I met my pre-girlfriend there last year.”

“I’m meeting my advisor,” said Charlie, zipping up his book bag with exaggerated finality. He made certain his Walkman would play “With or Without You” when he hit campus. The song still reminded him of Monica Miller, but he’d turned a corner in his listening, making the song less about her and more about him, how it wasn’t that easy being with Charlie Green, but things wouldn’t be the same without him.

“Nice move, Chaplin, getting in to see the advisor on your first day. Head starts are what it’s all about.”

“What’s a pre-girlfriend?”

“It’s the girl you date before your real freshman girlfriend.”

“Monica Miller’s my pre-girlfriend. Well, was. Can a breakup end with a kiss?”

“You already got through your pre-girlfriend? Another head start, you could be RA material, Chaplin. As long as you get those ideas about partying on the river out of your head.”

Charlie turned off the lights, casting Feldman in shadows. Feldman, undeterred by the surrounding blueness, kept using his clipboard. He’d raised a leg for added support, like Monica Miller did when she was trying to look seductive, and now it was more difficult for Charlie to leave his room cleanly.

“Let’s be careful out there,” said Feldman as Charlie inched his way past his knee. “You know that line? It’s from Hill Street Blues. Great show.”

“I don’t watch TV.”

He’d seen every episode.

*

Charlie had expected Miss Pettibone’s waiting area in College Hall to be like his principal’s reception area at high school, but there was no receptionist nor oil paintings, just a corridor of doors with numbers stenciled into cloudy glass. Some of the doors were open, on purpose, it would seem, so that adult voices could be heard down the marble corridor. “Goethe” and “ecclesiastical” echoed off the slabs, and the sound of electric typewriters. Pauses surrounded by torrents of letters.

Miss Pettibone’s door was shut. Shadows moved behind the glass. He knocked and the shadows scattered, but there was no response, so he sat on the cold floor and waited. Charlie liked cold floors. He liked that things could be alive with coldness instead of warmth. He wondered if Miss Pettibone ever held her meetings out here, on the marble. He could picture the backs of Monica Miller’s bare legs against the stone, but knew she’d ask to sit on his jacket, and that when he balked, she’d leave College Hall in search of a Haircut.

“Hi, did you just knock?” Victoria Pettibone was apparently unaware that her white blouse was open an extra button, and that part of her black lacy bra was exposed. “There’s no one else here, so it must have been you. Do you mind waiting a minute more?” she asked through a tense smile. “I’m just finishing up a meeting.”

“I don’t mind waiting,” said Charlie. “Really nice marble.” A skinny bearded guy sneaked out of Miss Pettibone’s office. He wore a backpack and an open denim shirt, which revealed freakishly straight black chest hair.

“Oh,” said Miss Pettibone, “you’re leaving. I guess our meeting is over.”

“I’ll see you, Miss Pettibone,” he said meaningfully, or sarcastically. It was hard for Charlie to tell.

“Okay,” she half-yelled after him as he strode down the corridor, one hand clutching his book bag, the other in a fist. It would be a good time to crank “With or Without You,” thought Charlie. This guy’s walk was informed by the gravitas of that video, as was every walk away from a woman that involved a fisted hand.

“Hmm,” said Miss Pettibone.

“Should we go in?” asked Charlie.

“Yes, of course.”

Charlie couldn’t tell if she was twenty-five or forty-five; at his age, all adults were still similarly dated. Her short spiky hair and citrusy perfume placed her in definitive adulthood, where skirt pleats battled with dangly gypsy earrings for the possession of her soul.

Miss Pettibone’s office faced the interior and was starved of light. To make matters dimmer, her desk lamp was off. Charlie squinted at the window where, outside, the summer lived, but in here was like under the huge oak tree at Camp Shining Star, where campers would take naps at high noon.

“Should I be expecting your parents?” asked Miss Pettibone. “Traditionally, I meet the parents during Move-in Day appointments.”

“My dad already left.”

“I see.” She was going to sit in her desk chair but now felt obliged to sit next to him. Every year there’s one who needs a mother, she thought, finally buttoning up her blouse.

On Miss Pettibone’s desk was a family photo: Miss Pettibone, a man with a gray ponytail, and a younger girl sitting in a canoe that wasn’t on water but in the middle of a city street. It was a flattering shot of her, but the daughter’s face was contorted from petulance, and the husband looked apple-faced or ill. Miss Pettibone shone by comparison. Charlie wondered if she were vain. She was pretty enough to be vain, though most of the prettiness came from her thinness and the way she wore professional clothing.

“Is that canoe on the street?” Charlie asked as she read his file.

“It was an art installation from last year.” His file read GREEN, CHARLIE. A winning moniker, thought Miss Pettibone.

“Did it block traffic?”

“It was only up for a week.”

“If I were driving home from work and got in a traffic jam because of a canoe in the middle of the street, I’d be upset. Not that I know how to drive.”

“So, Charlie, what can we accomplish today?” she said, reclaiming her desk chair.

Green Charlie looks a little tired, she thought. Some pallor about the cheeks and forehead where his tan was fading. But the navy jacket was a nice touch. Miss Pettibone had married older, and she wanted the same for her daughter. Of course, not all older men were created equal; she’d chosen a professor who owned a beloved wok and wore hiking shoes with his dress suits.

“I’ve had my heart set on some sort of late lunch in the city,” said Charlie, and Miss Pettibone nodded quick, birdlike nods that probably meant no. But Charlie continued. “To be honest, I sort of saw myself getting to Penn and having an adventure on the very first day. Things happen young to people in my family. At least with my parents and grandmother. The light in here seems to stop at the window, then just sort of dies.”

“Now, when you say an adventure, what did you have in mind? Because along Locust Walk, today through Labor Day, is the club fair. It’s where I would send you.”

Some part of her didn’t want Charlie to take the club fair bait. Lately, she knew about adventures. Real ones. Mournful guilt followed by new pangs of euphoria. She wouldn’t wish all of that on a young heart. It was unsafe, if not unsavory, but her heart could handle it—ate it up, in fact. This was her sixteenth year at Penn, advising students. The only job she’d ever had. She’d gone to school here and never left, married her sociology professor and had little to no sense if her work at Penn had made any difference at all. She only received phone calls from ex-students when they were ready to apply to grad school and needed transcripts or a recommendation. All of her advice was geared toward the creation of a good—no, a great GPA. Which meant a good two-year job after college, then a good grad school, then a great job after grad school. Then a great salary, and from that great salary, great gifts for Penn.

Exhausting, thought Miss Pettibone, and pictured herself dancing with Green Charlie at her daughter’s wedding. In ten years she’d be forty-eight, but knew her legs would still look good in stockings.

“My RA, Feldman, told me about the fair on Locust Walk,” said Charlie, “but I’m interested in something else.”

“What would your adventure look like?”

“It would happen near the Delaware River, at a restaurant, and there would be a bar.”

“Charlie, it’s my responsibility to let you know that the drinking age in Pennsylvania is twenty-one. What you’ve just said makes me think you might need some special sort of counseling. Have you had trouble with alcohol in the past?”

“No. I really like it.”

“There are pretty strict rules at Penn,” said Miss Pettibone. “I’d hate to see you get in any sort of trouble.” Her perfume filled the small, dark office. She knew it was too much, but she didn’t care. It was from a sampler she’d snatched months ago as she rushed through Wanamaker’s department store after the first forbidden afternoon. She’d needed the overdose. Otherwise, her husband, with his wine bouquet snout, might have asked her why she smelled nutty.

“In most civilized countries throughout the world, I’d already be of drinking age.”

“Well, Charlie, there’s an excellent anthropology class that compares and contrasts world customs.” That was her training: always bring it back to the course load.

“I like studying people. Especially ones at bars.”

“I don’t mind beginning our meeting with anecdotes about the adventures you have forecast for yourself. However, before this appointment is over, we do need to iron out your classes.”

However. That was her husband’s favorite word. Favorite flame-douser. I love forecasting adventures, thought Miss Pettibone. What else is there? Fuck however.

“So: courses. Because you hadn’t chosen any, I’ve placed you in four freshman surveys. All good, but a little directionless. Tell me about you and museums.”

“Museums?”

“You’re from New York City. I’m sure your parents and teachers directed you toward your city’s bounty of absolutely wonderful museums.”

“I liked hanging out in museums, but not because of the artifacts, but because of how sound traveled, and how I could get lost in all that cold marble.”

“Well, there’s a course for freshmen about curating a museum, particularly ancient Egyptian art and artifacts. Taught in our very own world-class art museum.”

Miss Pettibone liked to visit the college’s museum minutes before closing, when it was all but empty, and pretend it was her palace.

“One of my summer job options was working at the gift store of the Met,” said Charlie. “It was either that or Camp Shining Star. I didn’t like the idea of selling people posters of great paintings. There’s something wrong about a box of five hundred Monets.”

“The museum course has only one opening. I think you’ll love it.”

“Okay,” said Charlie. “I bet every girl thinks they’re Cleopatra. I bet they go to the museum to find their old jewelry.”

Miss Pettibone’s department cocktail party had been held at the museum last spring. She drank too much and had to be picked up by her husband. But such fun. Young fun. She wandered off with her glass of wine, sought an obscure corner, and sat before a collection of jade jewelry. It was something Green Charlie might do, she imagined now—leave the main scene in search of a smaller scene all his own.

About that, she was always right. Finding the life inside of these kids. Of course, she wasn’t encouraged to tap that force of energy. It was all about direction, helping these young men and women become people who would not wander off at the museum party, but stay in the center of things, listening to the speeches, clapping at the right parts, and drinking zero to one glass of wine. Adventures are what you read your kids at night.

“The museum’s a special place. I think it’s more in line with your sense of adventure,” she said.

“I guess so,” said Charlie, whistling a long, descending note that sounded like a bomb dropping, just as Jee-Jee did at the track after losing yet another horse race.

“Some students have visited Egypt in order to participate in a real excavation,” said Miss Pettibone. “I actually had a student who had taken this very course, and he spent his junior year working at the Egyptian embassy in Washington, DC. Now he works for a private bank in New York, advising them about their Middle Eastern investments. It just goes to show you how one experience can lead to the next and so on.”

“Hmm,” said Charlie.

“I know it sounds overwhelming, but all of the pieces will fall into place. The key is to take it one piece at a time.”

“It sounds like dominoes. My nanny wouldn’t let me play, she thought it was a game the devil would play.”

“Then think of it as building a foundation. Building something from the ground up. Something solid.”

“Like a square box?”

“Sure. Rectangular. Solid—”

“Like a coffin,” said Charlie.

She ran her fingers through her moussed hair and swiveled her chair to face the window. He was right about the light stopping where it did. At least the room was always a little cool. She’d refused an air conditioner on her very first day. Her pencil cup was precisely where she’d placed it on May 22, 1971, with the dangerously sharp letter opener she knew she’d never dare touch. The room was better suited for winter, but even in the summer, it was winter in here. Labor Day weekends were the worst, but it was Miss Pettibone’s crunch time, so her daughter suffered a landlocked three days while her classmates held on to their summers, splashing in the ocean.

Tonight, though, Miss Pettibone was taking her daughter to see Dirty Dancing. All summer she’d asked to go. They’d bought her the soundtrack in June, but she’d played it so often that the tape came undone in her little pink cassette player.

“Were I you,” said Miss Pettibone, “I’d avoid the bars near the Delaware today.”

“I know that you’d rather have me on campus, but—”

“The lunches are cacophonous. Tables crammed together. And most of the old seafood places only have views of strangers in lobster bibs or those big glass balls in netting. The water is far away.” Her husband liked to prey on the early bird dinners. Two lobster tails for $14.95. The sound of him licking his buttered fingers.

“Really? Please tell me more.” Charlie leaned forward, his eyes wide and moist, to attract more details.

“There’s a nice little place in Center City, with oyster plates on the walls and old wooden floors. Sawdust on the floors.”

“Sawdust! Is it dark? I hope it is.”

“It isn’t really dark, but it’s not offensively bright.”

It was at the beginning of the summer that things had started falling apart, and other things started to come together. At the Sansom Street Oyster House, she confessed to having kissed another man; after many breathless oh my Gods, her best friend whisked her to a table in back for a debriefing. Miss Pettibone had chosen the Sansom Street Oyster House for its anonymity, but a colleague she never cared for had complained about its utter lack of modernity, its sawdust and uninspired maleness. People in her office made everything into a fucking book review. Same with the know-it-all husband at home.

“I think it’s a charming place,” said Miss Pettibone.

“It sounds that way. Were there any younger people? Not kids. Not college kids, but charming girls? A charming girl?”

“I was with my friend, talking, but there seemed to be some old salts at the bar.”

Old salts. Charlie closed his eyes and smelled Coney Island on V-E Day. “Do you think, Miss Pettibone, that falling in love is a form of time travel?”

She had been about to mention the English department’s Romantic Novel in Industrial America course, but instead she smiled. “Yes.”

She was being generous, Charlie knew. Taking a big chance, sending a freshman to a bar.

“Thank you, Miss Pettibone. You might be the first adult who has ever treated me this way. I’m not sure if this is part of the advisory program, or maybe a new thing where you give students what they really want, regardless of the consequences, so they can learn some sort of a lesson. Whatever it is, I won’t let you down. I’ll definitely visit you again and tell you everything that happened at the—what was it called?”

“The Sansom Street Oyster House.”

Nothing will happen, she thought. But it’s good that you’ll feel free for a few moments. Two chardonnays and you’ll get a big headache, and the adventure will end. You’ll take a taxi back to campus with your tail between your legs, but all’s forgiven. And I hope you’ll forgive me when I put you back on track for, let’s see, cum laude in economics? Sound good? Good.

“It must have been cozy in there,” said Charlie.

“At the Oyster House?”

“No, in the canoe, with your family. In the middle of the street.”

“Not really. There was a line of people waiting to get in to have their photos snapped, so you couldn’t get that comfortable.”

“You can’t tell any of that from the photo,” said Charlie. “I didn’t bring any photos to Penn.”

“This year, you’ll have plenty of new photo opportunities.” Here she’d usually insert how Penn was his new family, and that this family, just like the one at home, lasts a lifetime. Even longer if you start gift-giving upon graduation. Twenty-five dollars a week was a more than reasonable start.

“This has been an unorthodox first meeting, Charlie,” said Miss Pettibone, worried now about being fired for sending a student to a seafood bar. “Again, I must remind you of the drinking age in Pennsylvania, and urge you to remain on campus, but I am only your advisor, and your two legs will take you where they must.”

My husband will want Indian food before the movie tonight, because it’s cheap and he can smile knowingly at the sitar player. The definition of heaven is escaping hell, she thought. Or maybe the real, practical definition was enduring hell, accessorizing it with paisley scarves.

She’d moved in with her husband before they were married. It was tight, just the two of them, and now that the living room had become her daughter’s space, there was little she could call her own, save for the corner in the bedroom where she had a standing desk and had draped a paisley scarf over the lampshade.

Charlie stood because Miss Pettibone was standing, looking out the window, rolling the eraser end of a pencil back and forth above her lip.

“Do you happen to know the address of the Oyster House?” he asked. “I saw on the map they gave us freshmen that the campus ends at Thirty-Second Street, then there seems to be a wasteland until Twenty-Third Street, when the city begins again.”

“I’ll write it down for you,” she said. “As for that wasteland, there are some industrial stretches in Philly, but if you keep on walking, you’ll get to some wonderful little neighborhoods. So, I’ve enrolled you in creative writing, European history, and chemistry, in addition to the museum course. Let’s meet again in October and see how you’re doing.”

“If I’m still at Penn, of course.”

You’ll still be here, Green Charlie, thought Miss Pettibone. But I’ll miss the boy who stands before me today in his formal jacket, believing the world is knowing enough to know his dreams. If the dean asks, I’ll tell him I sent Green Charlie into the city on an odyssey, that he was a fan of Homer’s Odyssey.

“Have you read The Odyssey?” she asked Charlie.

“I never got into myths.”

There was a course called Myths and the Modern World; Wharton-ites took it to fulfill their one humanities credit, writing papers about how Morgan and Rockefeller were the only true descendants of Zeus. But this boy didn’t want to wield 1987 lightning bolts. He wanted to hold 1937 stemware. Despite all his chatter, there was something humble about Green Charlie. Miss Pettibone watched him lick his thumb and buff his penny loafer. Something an older man might do. Not a great man, maybe even a wrecked man, thought Miss Pettibone.

Enough. He’s only eighteen. He wants to get drunk at a grown-up bar.

“I bet if you encounter The Odyssey in your studies at Penn, you’ll have a new appreciation, Charlie. I see some of that story in your desire to walk around today. It’s all about a person wanting to go home, and whether that’s even possible.”

She gave him her home number, in case of an emergency. All of her students got it. Maybe he’d call during Dirty Dancing, she thought. Maybe he’d call and leave a long message from the crowded and happy bar where women just like her smiled with their husbands about how they’d make love once they were home. The lightest couple in the room. It was impossible to be light at the Indian buffet.

“Well, then, I should keep the office open for walk-ins. The parents get impatient if the door is closed for more than a couple of minutes. Bon chance,” said Miss Pettibone, throwing up her hands as her husband did when he felt he’d said all there was to say.

“Merci,” said Charlie.

There was no one waiting outside her door. There was no one in the hallway in either direction, just Charlie and the sound of typewriters. She took her time affixing the doorstop, making sure the worn brown triangle went all the way under the door. She’d just gotten a pedicure. She’d just had the soles of her feet kissed by red lips and their black beard. She’d just sent a kid to a bar.

Now I’ll type up my notes about Green Charlie, she thought, and my typing will join the other typing.