Joyce Oates - Hazards of Time Travel

She never smiled at us. Her face was like a mask. She prayed on her knees—we’d seen her! She cried herself to sleep every night like us, only worse.

We were all homesick, our first semester at Wainscotia. Missed our parents and our families so! But this girl was sad in a way we weren’t—like her heart was broken. And she would not be comforted—which does not seem natural.

We were Christian girls, mostly Protestant. We attended chapel on Sundays. (She never did—we noticed that.) We believed in prayer—seriously!

We believed in helping one another. We believed in smiling-through-tears. You cried, and then you laughed—you opened a box of brownies your mom had sent to you, to share with your roommates, or anyone who showed up in the room.

You cried, and wiped away your tears—and you were yourself again.

She was the girl who scorned our mothers’ brownies, and scorned the opportunity to walk with us to class on the steep-hilly sidewalks leading into the campus, who almost never came with us to the dining hall and sat with us. She’d gone to freshman orientation alone, and slipped away alone. The only girl in Acrady Cottage who didn’t participate in Vesper Song.

Probably the only person in the freshman class who claimed she’d “lost” her green-and-purple freshman beanie. Who paid no heed to upperclassmen ordering her to “step out of the way, frosh”—stared through them as if she didn’t see them and kept walking in her stiff-hunched way like a sleepwalker you pitied and would not want to waken.

The girl-with-no-name we called her. For if you called out a cheery Hi there, Mary Ellen!—she didn’t seem to hear, or to register the name, even as she quickened her pace hurrying away.

We knew little about her. But we knew that she was a scholarship girl, like us.

Acrady Cottage was a residence for freshman scholarship girls—meaning that most of us couldn’t have afforded Wainscotia State except for financial aid and part-time jobs on campus.

(She had a part-time job in the geology library.)

Scholarship girls were thrifty girls! Most of our textbooks were used—some of them pretty badly battered.

We wore hand-me-down clothes and clothes sewn by our mothers or grandmothers—or by us.

Quite a few of us were 4-H girls. We were three Wisconsin State Fair blue-ribbon winners, in Acrady Cottage.

Acrady wasn’t a residence hall like the ivy-covered stone buildings elsewhere on campus—it was just a house, plain weathered-gray shingle board, where freshman girls lived who could not afford to live anywhere else.

But Acrady Cottage had spirit!

At Vesper Song, Acrady excelled though we were one of the smaller residences on campus—twenty-two girls.

Twenty-two girls including “Mary Ellen”—the girl who kept to herself like someone in quarantine.

First week at Wainscotia we were all homesick. But trying to be cheerful—“friendly.”

Not her—“Mary Ellen Enright.”

She’d avoid us if she could. Her own roommates!—that isn’t easy.

Four of us in the third-floor room. Cramped space and just two (dormer) windows.

She’d taken the bed that was farthest, in a corner. And her desk jutted out from the wall, to partially hide the bed from the rest of the room. No window in that corner.

She’d shrink from us. Trying to smile—a weird bright smile that didn’t reach her eyes.

And then, when she thought we were asleep and wouldn’t see her, on her knees in the corner, praying.

And crying herself to sleep.

She looked like someone who has traveled a long journey and has not fully recovered.

We’d wondered—Is she foreign?

But what kind of foreign?

Even the way she spoke was strange. If you cornered her to say hello and ask how she was and she couldn’t escape or avoid answering she would stammer a reply that was almost—but not quite—intelligible. We could recognize in her speech the rhythms and vowel-sounds of English, so if we didn’t exactly know what she was saying, we could guess.

And she spoke so fast and nervous! Like none of the other girls of Acrady Cottage.

Of course, we were all from the Midwest. Most of us from Wisconsin. Where Mary Ellen was from was—one of the eastern states, we’d been told. Evidently people talked faster there.

Our part of the U.S., it’s generally known as the Happy Place. (Midwest!) And Wainscotia is a very special university at the heart of the Happy Place.

This girl Mary Ellen, we had to wonder: Was she a Christian?

Was she—Jewish?

None of us from Wisconsin had ever seen a Jewish person, before coming to Wainscotia. But there were Jewish people here—professors, it was said, as well as students. A few.

There was even a Jewish fraternity, and there was a Jewish sorority. So they could live with their own kind. This was amazing to us!

In large cities in Wisconsin, like Milwaukee, and Madison, there were Jewish people—we knew that. But we were mostly from upstate Wisconsin, or rural counties. German, Scandinavian, Scots and Irish backgrounds—and English of course.

Also, “Mary Ellen” did not look like us. This was difficult to explain, but we all agreed. Her hair was darkish blond, spiky like it hadn’t been combed or brushed properly; never curled or waved, and not washed often enough. It needed cutting, and trimming. And she went to bed without hairpins or rollers. Ever.

Didn’t do anything for her hair. Didn’t even seem to recognize what rollers were!

(Like she didn’t seem to know how a phone worked—the way you dial with your forefinger. Of all of us in Acrady Cottage, only Mary Ellen would shrink from answering the phone when it rang near her, so we had to wonder—was it possible her family didn’t own a telephone?)

(And she didn’t smoke! And was forever coughing from our cigarette smoke—coughing in fits, until her eyes watered—though she never complained as you’d have expected a nonsmoker to complain. You could see the misery in her face but it was what you’d call long-suffering misery.)

She might have been pretty—almost—except she never wore lipstick. A guy looking at her would look right past her, there was so little to catch the male eye. (We all wore red—very red—lipstick!) She didn’t even pluck her eyebrows which is about the least a girl can do, to make herself attractive.

She looked like a convalescent. Some wasting disease that left her skinny, and her skin ashy-pale and sort of grainy as if it would be rough to the touch like sandpaper. Her eyes would have been beautiful eyes—they were dark-brown, like liquid chocolate—with thick lashes—but they were likely to be narrowed and squinting as if she were looking into a bright, blinding light. And she did not look you in the eye—like a guilty person.

Along with not smoking, she also didn’t eat potato chips, glazed doughnuts, Cheez-bits, M&M’s, and those little cellophane bags of Planters peanuts that were our favorite snacks while we were studying, that left salt all over our fingers. She didn’t eat any kind of chewy meat like beef or pork or even chicken, sometimes. She’d eat fish casseroles.

Which was why she was so skinny. Flat-chested, and her hips flat, like a guy’s, she didn’t have to struggle into girdles like the rest of us.

Didn’t even know what a “girdle” was—just stared at Trishie’s when she was getting dressed for a frat party, like she’d never seen anything so scary!