Description

I want to tell you about a place. I want you to go there with me, to stand beneath the concrete archway. But I don't have to tell you it's concrete, and I don't want you to have to see it the way I do.

I want to take you to a place, but it's a universal place. It's not Paris. It's not Rome. It's not Tokyo. It's high school.

I only have to say the words wrought-iron gate and concrete pillars, and I've got the high school entrance right in my mind. Of course I do, I walked through it every day for four years.

I don't want you to have to see that high school. I want you to see yours, or your best friend's or your husband's.

I want to tell you what happened to a young, slim, scared little girl when she went to high school. Though the setting in my mind is that semi-urban high school by the cemetary, you don't have to see it that way.

I want to take you somewhere. I want you to relate to the girl in the plaid skirt.

I don't want to spend pages and pages telling you about the green grass and the unheated winters.

I just want you to know it already.

Can you see it yet?

Snippets

Walking across Lower Sproul Plaza, late on an early September night. It's still warm, still that completely un-PC term of Indian Summer. There's a hint of a breeze. I almost wish I had a sweater, but I'm warm on the inside. I've just finished filling out my "preference card" for sorority recruitment (AKA Rush). I am a college freshman. I'm wearing a white t-shirt and a blue and white plaid "skort" (I'll soon learn why this is unquestionably not something I should ever wear in public). I've got on my favorite sandals, the leather soft and supple but the shoes still in good condition (unlike my favorite flip-flops, which have retired to my parents' garage), and my legs are long and tan. I can feel the breeze on my arms - also tan from a season of swim team and a summer in the sun. I feel beautiful. I feel like I'm in college.

That moment, that quiet, dark night, the campus belongs to me. Berkeley is mine and mine alone.

Heading to class, walking through the Eucylaptus grove, watching my feet on the flagstone path, I think about how one day, one distant day, I will walk that path with my husband, my child. That moment. Well, those multiple moments, belong completely to me. I breathe in the fresh smell of the trees. I feel my feet on the hard, cold ground. I brush autumn's leaves out of my path.

Late afternoons, walking up Bancroft Avenue, heading to the sorority that I chose and that chose me, I hear the sounds of people yelling, talking, living. I walk, sometimes hunched over with the weight of my backback, sometimes fresh and happy, eager for the evening ahead. All of Berkeley belongs to me.

Crowded in the bathroom. Hurrying around my own bedroom, curlers, hair dryers, makeup, clothes, scattered around the room. Making that wonderful mess that is getting ready for a party. Curling someone else's hair (even if she ended up not liking it later). Zipping dresses. Dancing around to whatever pre-party music someone had chosen. The smell of at least six different perfumes and a dozen different hairsprays permeating the air. Twenty different stereos playing throughout the house, creating a mix no DJ would ever attempt. Those memories, those moments, belong to us all.