Ruth Hardy’s face was pretty, with a small red mouth and sharp blue eyes that looked straight at a person. Her gaze never wandered and she rarely blinked. She looked at people as she did everything else — neatly and precisely with no waste motion.
She was Linda’s roommate. They shared a little cubicle in Evans Hall, a tiny unprepossessing room with a double-decker bed, two desks, two dressers, a closet that was not quite large enough for two people and a sink that dripped, its bowl stained from the dripping of the hard water. The water, with a high iron content typical of the region, managed to do two things — it stained the sink a sickish red-brown and it forced a girl to spend twice as much time as usual washing her hair.
Linda had just finished washing her hair. First she had showered, and in this respect the hard water was good. It left her feeling cleaner, without the slippery feeling of a softwater shower. But her hair! God, she had had to lather it a good half-dozen times before she was done. Now it hung down her back, wet and limp, as she sat in a chair in the room.
Ruth was sprawled on her bed. She had the top bunk, and both the girls were quite satisfied with the arrangement.
“I’m a sound sleeper,” Ruth had explained. “This way you can give me a good kick when the alarm goes off.”
They became friends quite readily. Linda decided that she liked this girl, this sharp, fast-talking little thing from New York City. And, she reflected, it was good that they had taken to each other as readily as they did. There were no fraternities or sororities at Clifton, since social groups of that nature were hardly needed on a campus of 1500. She and Ruth would be stuck with each other for the semester at least and probably for the year; it would be a lot easier to take if they liked each other.
Their conversation rambled the way conversation does between two persons suddenly thrust into a close relationship. Ruth told her that she was from New York and that she had come to Clifton largely to get away from a family with which she didn’t get along well at all. She planned to major in either psychology or sociology and possibly to do graduate work after finishing up at Clifton. Linda answered that she would major in English, that she doubted that she would do graduate work in anything, since it was highly doubtful that she would graduate.
“How come?”
“I’ll probably be married by then.”
“That why you came to college?”
Linda hesitated. “Partly, I guess. Oh, I suppose I want to get an education, whatever that means. But I’m not the scholar type or the career type. I guess I’m looking for a man.”
“Well, you shouldn’t have much trouble finding a man here, not the way you look. You’ll probably have to beat them off with a club.”
Linda felt herself blushing.
“I mean it,” Ruth went on. “All that blonde hair and a shape like yours — the guys won’t let you alone. You know much about this school?”
“Just what it says in the catalogue.”
Ruth laughed. “It doesn’t say much in the catalogue. I know one girl who goes here, a sophomore gal named Sheila Ashley. She told me they call the catalogue The Big Lie. But the one big selling point they left out is that there are three men for every gal at Clifton College, Citadel of Higher Learning.”
“Oh.”
“Oh is right. It’s a damn nice ratio.”
Linda nodded.
“Of course,” Ruth continued, “there’s a difference between finding a man and finding a husband. Men are nice to have around, but most of them are interested in just one thing. Know what the thing is?”
Linda felt herself beginning to blush again and fought to suppress it. Why did Ruth have that effect on her? Maybe it was the hard, cool stare in the girl’s blue eyes, the casual self-assurance that made Linda feel inexperienced and naive in comparison.
“How much experience have you had, Linda?”
Linda hesitated.
“You’re a virgin, aren’t you?”
She hesitated again for a moment. Then she nodded, feeling almost as though her virginity was something to be embarrassed about.
“Don’t be ashamed of it. For one thing, you probably won’t last that way long, not if what I hear about this place is true. And for another thing it’s nothing to be ashamed of. Sometimes I wish I was a virgin myself.”
“You mean—”
“I mean I’m not, obviously. New York’s a pretty fast-moving town, Linda.”
For a moment Linda didn’t say anything. Then, slowly, she asked: “What’s... what’s it like?”
Ruth laughed, but her laughter was cool and pleasant and it didn’t make Linda ashamed of her question. “That’s something I can’t tell you,” she said. “Something you’ll have to find out for yourself. I haven’t been around that much to be an authority on the subject, anyhow. But from what I know about it, you don’t have to rush into it. It’s not as great as it’s cracked up to be, anyway. It’s just one of the things that happens.”
They talked some more, grabbed dinner at the school cafeteria and went back to their room to talk on into the night. From time to time other girls in the same hall would drop in to talk, but Linda was too wrapped up in herself to pay much attention to them. She told Ruth about Chuck and about the night of the senior prom when she almost let him make love to her, and she told the girl about her decision to sleep with the next man who wanted her and whom she wanted. They talked and talked, and finally it was after midnight and time to get some sleep. They undressed and washed up and climbed into bed, Ruth in the top bunk and Linda in the one below it, and then, of course, they went on talking.
“We better knock it off,” Ruth said finally. “Tomorrow’s registration and it’ll be a rough day.”
“Good-night,” Linda said. She rolled over on her side and closed her eyes, her mind swimming with all the new experience of the day and the immensity of all that lay before her. She decided that she wasn’t really tired. Since she had to get to sleep she tried counting.
She was more tired than she thought. She was sound asleep before the fifth mental man jumped over the mental fence.
The next morning she registered for her courses. Her hall advisers, two upper class students named Paula Greene and Jeanne Randall who lived in the hall and served in an advisory capacity, helped her make out her program. She signed up for the required freshman English course, Spanish I, Western Civilization, Introduction to Sociology and Basic Biology.
The rest of the day was filled up with a hall meeting and more random conversations and bull sessions with Ruth and other members of the hall. Ruth was going to be in her sociology class and was a good deal more enthusiastic about it than she was. As far as Linda was concerned, classes were going to be a bore, a necessary evil like paying tuition. If classes were the important thing she might as well have stayed in Cleveland.
She bought her books at the college store, a batch of heavy textbooks that set her back over twenty dollars. Carting the books back to her room, she wondered how in the world they could be worth that much money to her. In all probability she would hardly so much as open them until the night before exams. That was the way she went through high school, never studying and never working and depending upon her brains to pull her through, brains and common sense. And she never got a mark below ninety in high school.
Of course, college was supposed to be a lot more difficult. You had to study and you had to do your assignments. But a smart gal ought to be able to get through on brains if she had them.