Hazards of Time Travel. Joyce Carol Oates

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!

       Scholarship girls in Acrady Cottage studied, hard. We worked long hours at our desks for we had to retain B averages or lose our scholarships. But Mary Ellen Enright worked harder, and longer than any of us—so far as we knew, Mary Ellen did almost nothing else except her schoolwork, and her part-time job in the geology library!

       At her desk with her back to the room, and to her roommates, she was unnaturally still, concentrated upon her work motionless as a mannequin but so tense, you could see the tension in her neck and shoulders.

       As if she was holding back a scream, or a sob.

       Yet she remained at her desk, with the crook-necked lamp shining a halo of light onto the desktop, for as long as she could endure it—if none of her roommates objected to the light.

       (At first we did not object. We had no trouble sleeping with a single light on in the room. But as time passed, and we grew less patient with our misfit-roommate, we did object, and Mary Ellen took her work downstairs to the work-study lounge where she would disturb no one, and no one would disturb her. And sometimes she slept there, on a couch. And we did not have to hear her sob herself to sleep!)

       It was hard to say what was wrong with Mary Ellen. The way she’d stare at us, and look away—like she’d seen something scary—made us think there was something wrong with us.

       We hoped (sort of) that she would drop out of school. Or transfer. This was cruel of us, and not very Christian—we were not proud of such thoughts. But we were girls who’d only just graduated from high school a few months before and maybe Mary Ellen scared us, so close to the edge. Close to mental and physical collapse as we’d sometimes felt ourselves away from home for the first time and at the University of Wisconsin–Wainscotia where 9,400 students were enrolled.

       A certain percentage of freshmen dropped out in the first several weeks of their first semester at Wainscotia. You’d hear of someone—mostly girls, but there were boys, too—who just “broke down”—“couldn’t sleep”—“cried all the time”—“felt lost.”

       But Mary Ellen seemed determined not to be one of these. She was deeply unhappy and seemed to us—(to some of us,