mistook volume for vamp-ishness. Back in those days I had what one teacher called "a vivacious personality." I had to look up the word in the dictionary and was relieved to find out it didn't mean I had problems. English was then still a party favor for me-crack open the dictionary, find out if I'd just been insulted, praised, admonished, criticized. Those shy prep school guys at mixers with their endearing long hands and blushing complexions, I could make them laugh. I could make them believe they had really engaged a girl in conversation. There wasn't a Saturday afternoon or Sunday after morning service that I didn't have callers. A bunch of guys from our brother school would come down the hill and hang out in our parlor to get away from their dormitories, maybe sneaking a cigarette or a swig from a flask on the walk over. At our front desk, they had to give a girl's name, and quite a few gave mine. This had nothing to do with my being attractive in any remarkable way. This was vivaciousness through and through.
When I went away to college, my
vivaciousness ultimately worked against me. I'd meet someone, conversation would flow, they'd come calling, but pretty soon afterwards, just as my heart was beginning to throw out little tendrils of attachment, they'd leave.
I couldn't keep them interested. Why I couldn't keep them interested was pretty simple: I wouldn't sleep with them. By the time I went to college, it was the late sixties, and everyone was sleeping around as a matter of principle. By then, I was a lapsed Catholic,- my sisters and I had been pretty well Americanized since our arrival in this country a decade before, so really, I didn't have a good excuse. Why I didn't just sleep with someone
as
persistent as Rudy Elmenhurst is a mystery I'm exploring here by picking it apart the way we learned to do to each other's poems and stories in the English class where I met Rudolf
Brodermann Elmenhurst, the third.
Rudolf Brodermann Elmenhurst, the third, didn't show up until ten minutes or so into the class. I, on the other hand, had been the first to arrive, selecting a place around the seminar table close to the door, but unfortunately since the table was round, equally exposed. Others strolled in, the English jocks at the school. I knew they were special from their jeans and T-shirts, their knowing, ironic looks when obscure works of literature were referred to. The girls didn't all knit during class like education and socio majors. I'd already been writing on my own for a while, but this was my first English class since I'd talked my parents into letting me transfer to this co-ed college last fall.
At my place around the seminar table I unpacked my notebook and every one of the required and recommended texts which I had already bought, stacking them in front of me like my credentials. Most of the other students were too cool to have done anything hasty like purchase the books for the course. The professor walked in, a young guy in a turtleneck and jacket, the uniform of the
with it
professors of the day; he had that edge of the untenured, too eager, too many handouts, too many please feel frees
on his syllabus, a home number as well as an office number. He called roll, acknowledging most of the other students with nicknames and jokes and remarks, stumbling over my name and smiling falsely at me, a smile I had identified as one flashed on "foreign students" to show them the natives were friendly. I felt profoundly out of place. The only person I seemed to have anything in common with was the absent Rudolf Brodermann Elmenhurst, the third, who also had an odd name and who was out of it because he wasn't there.
We were into the logistics of how to make copies for workshops when a young man walked in, late. He was one of those guys who has just come through a bout of adolescent acne into a scarred, masculine, bad-boy face. A guy to be passed over by the beauties in our class looking for sweethearts.
He had an
When I went away to college, my
vivaciousness ultimately worked against me. I'd meet someone, conversation would flow, they'd come calling, but pretty soon afterwards, just as my heart was beginning to throw out little tendrils of attachment, they'd leave.
I couldn't keep them interested. Why I couldn't keep them interested was pretty simple: I wouldn't sleep with them. By the time I went to college, it was the late sixties, and everyone was sleeping around as a matter of principle. By then, I was a lapsed Catholic,- my sisters and I had been pretty well Americanized since our arrival in this country a decade before, so really, I didn't have a good excuse. Why I didn't just sleep with someone
as
persistent as Rudy Elmenhurst is a mystery I'm exploring here by picking it apart the way we learned to do to each other's poems and stories in the English class where I met Rudolf
Brodermann Elmenhurst, the third.
Rudolf Brodermann Elmenhurst, the third, didn't show up until ten minutes or so into the class. I, on the other hand, had been the first to arrive, selecting a place around the seminar table close to the door, but unfortunately since the table was round, equally exposed. Others strolled in, the English jocks at the school. I knew they were special from their jeans and T-shirts, their knowing, ironic looks when obscure works of literature were referred to. The girls didn't all knit during class like education and socio majors. I'd already been writing on my own for a while, but this was my first English class since I'd talked my parents into letting me transfer to this co-ed college last fall.
At my place around the seminar table I unpacked my notebook and every one of the required and recommended texts which I had already bought, stacking them in front of me like my credentials. Most of the other students were too cool to have done anything hasty like purchase the books for the course. The professor walked in, a young guy in a turtleneck and jacket, the uniform of the
with it
professors of the day; he had that edge of the untenured, too eager, too many handouts, too many please feel frees
on his syllabus, a home number as well as an office number. He called roll, acknowledging most of the other students with nicknames and jokes and remarks, stumbling over my name and smiling falsely at me, a smile I had identified as one flashed on "foreign students" to show them the natives were friendly. I felt profoundly out of place. The only person I seemed to have anything in common with was the absent Rudolf Brodermann Elmenhurst, the third, who also had an odd name and who was out of it because he wasn't there.
We were into the logistics of how to make copies for workshops when a young man walked in, late. He was one of those guys who has just come through a bout of adolescent acne into a scarred, masculine, bad-boy face. A guy to be passed over by the beauties in our class looking for sweethearts.
He had an
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