Chapter 35: Meet the Parents, Part 2
And so our vacation went. We stayed until the following Friday. One day I drove us up to Rehoboth and showed her around that small town. Another day we drove down to Assateague and went to the National Park. One night we drove down there very late and parked in a deserted spot, went skinny-dipping, and made love in the dunes. Most days we worked on our tans and practiced various things in the Kama Sutra book. We used those two boxes of rubbers I had bought and ended up buying a third!
Friday we needed to leave. For one thing, Marilyn’s period hit her and put an end to our Kama Sutra practice sessions. For another, we had to go back home. After checking out, we drove back to Towson and over to the bar where Tusker and Tessa worked. I picked up my car keys and gave them a big box of salt water taffy. We also talked about all of our plans for the future, and I really pushed Tusker on the idea of going back to school, at least part-time, and taking some business classes. I got their address and gave them one of my cards, with the frat phone number penciled in.
Tessa had giggled, “You and your business cards!” I had gotten some new cards printed up freshman year, with a Troy PO Box number, and no phone listing. Freshman year I didn’t have a phone I could accept calls on, and in the frat we had several. We had a pay phone down in the foyer, and there were a number of private lines among the brothers. Usually one guy would front the account and handle billing, and we would run party lines to two or three nearby rooms. I handled this one year. In those days, phone calls were expensive, especially long distance, and you would have to go through the itemized phone bills and sort each long distance call to a user, and bill them. Major pain in the balls!
From there, Marilyn followed me to the storage unit I had been renting since I moved out of my apartment. We crammed everything but the furniture into our two cars, and I paid for another year’s rent on the unit. I had already rented a storage unit in Troy. The plan was that I would move all of my stuff north in one or two trips, so that I was effectively living entirely in New York. For all intents and purposes I was no longer a Maryland resident. I had already registered as a voter in New York. I wondered if my father was still claiming me as a dependent. I hoped he didn’t get in trouble if he was.
It had been a long day. We drove for a few hours more, until we got about half way through New Jersey, before pulling off the road and getting a room for the night. Marilyn was somewhat embarrassed by her monthly visitor and apologized to me that we couldn’t make love. I just smiled and told her it wasn’t important, and let her snuggle in my arms until she fell asleep. It was a very pleasant and comfortable feeling. I had always enjoyed sleeping with Marilyn, even if it was simply snuggling up against her spoon fashion. I wanted to keep doing it.
Saturday we drove the rest of the way to Troy, and then dumped my stuff at the storage unit. Suddenly both our cars rose up off the springs! Then we drove over to the frat and moved into Bradley’s and my room on the third floor. He wasn’t scheduled to arrive for another day or so, so we could spend the night together without worrying about him. It was a chaste night. Sunday, Marilyn gave me a good-bye kiss and headed home.
Sunday almost all of the other brothers showed up, including Joe. It was the start of Work Week, an annual bacchanalia dedicated to patching up the house. This was under the control of one of the two paid positions in the house, the House Manager. The other paid position was the Kitchen Steward. Pay was set as equal to room and board, so no cash actually exchanged hands. I already described the Kitchen Steward job, which I had previously had. House Manager was not my thing. It called for somebody with very practical hands-on skills in repairing an antebellum Federal style monstrosity. Something was always falling apart in the place, it was generally a death trap if a fire occurred, and the furnace and water heater were always in need of repair. It was a thankless position.
Work Week was the week before classes started, and attendance was mandatory. During the day, the House Manager broke us into teams to do various repairs and maintenance — lawn work, fixing the fence, painting all the trim, patching and painting drywall, and anything else he could dream of. At night, we applied these same techniques to our own rooms. Joe and I painted everything and stripped and varnished our desks and bunk beds. It isn’t totally work, though. Every night was a drunken bash around the swimming pool. Marty, Ricky, and I told the others about our adventures on the road, and we all swapped lies about our girlfriends over the summer. Okay, they weren’t lies in my case, but I really didn’t go into too much detail; Marilyn would not be amused.
Barry was running the phone system on the third floor of the main house that year. I used my knowledge of running twisted pair phone cable and rearranged telephones for both Joe and myself. By mid-week I got my first letter from Marilyn, a syrupy love letter that made several references to the fun we had in Ocean City. She used strawberry scented stationery with little hearts all over it, the sort of thing a fourteen year old girl uses in junior high.
Back when I rubbed that lamp, I still had those letters from college from her, stuffed in the back of a file cabinet. Some things you don’t throw out.
I called her at her home after I read her letter a few times. We talked for about half an hour, until Bradley came in and I hung up. No way did I need him hearing me talking to her. We discussed when we could see each other again. She couldn’t say anything openly, since I think she was talking on the kitchen telephone, but when I asked her if she had gone to Planned Parenthood, she said, “First thing I did Monday morning.” That made me smile. We decided to wait a few weeks until after school started before trying a visit. I was to travel to Utica to meet the Lefleur family. The plan was to do this in about three weeks.
That didn’t work out. Three weeks out I caught the flu, along with about half the house and RPI. I could barely make my way down the stairs to the bathroom, let alone a hundred miles across the state. By the time I recovered enough the next weekend, Marilyn had a cold. We put things off another weekend.
Scholastically, I was taking all senior level math courses by now, with a grad level Information Theory course tossed in for good measure. The grad courses weren’t going to be a problem. What I was worried about was my doctoral dissertation. It was already pretty definite that Professor Rhineburg was going to be my thesis adviser, and we made the relationship formal. He taught my class on Information Theory, and it looked like that was going to be my area of specialty.
The nice thing about RPI for grad studies is that they don’t pin you into neat little boxes. They specialize in interdisciplinary studies. Many students do degrees mixing engineering and a science, or two different scientific disciplines. If somebody could think up a way to mix chemical engineering and French literature, and find a way to sell it to the academic committee, they’d be allowed to get a degree in it. I was thinking of mixing two different fields of Set Theory together, probably Information Theory and Topology, both of which I had always found fascinating.
This time around I kept my vices under much better control. Last time I had spent a lot of time smoking dope with Andy Kowalchuk, and not spending any time on school work. I cut that shit way back, not out of any moral difficulty with it, but simply because it was too distracting. I remembered back when I went to grad school the first time. Suddenly I was going to work days and school nights and I was commuting to grad school. Later, when I got married and had kids, it really hit me, just how much time I had wasted goofing off. By putting even a little effort into time management, and not being stoned 24/7, I actually was able to go to class and learn a thing or two. I went from a C average to straight As.