- Norfolk
Click for larger view
View full resolution
[End Page 148]
Dear Hettie,
Just a line to say how happy I am you’ve taken on the job of Class Correspondent. I can’t begin to imagine what hard work it must be, getting news out of all us girls, but I’m sure you’ll do a terrific job. I know I for one always look forward to getting the Alumnae Magazine and reading our class notes so I can find out what everybody’s up to—even though I repeatedly discover I didn’t know most of the contributors when we were in school (like you, for instance). I’m not sure if that’s [End Page 149] because I was shy or because we all tended to limit ourselves to the girls we lived with freshman year, now fifty-some years in the past! Actually, there are lots of things I don’t understand about our college experience—like all those truths I learned back then that no longer seem to be true. For example, to this day whenever I’m in a restaurant I find myself scanning the room to check if anybody has his/her elbows on the table, and I have discovered that in virtually every restaurant I’ve visited in America, Europe, and Asia, in every restaurant of any quality whatsoever, McDonald’s or the French Laundry, somebody has his/her elbows propped solidly on the table, whether in facilitation of discussion or manipulation of knife and fork (in whatever hand) or in simple repose. Usually there are several culprits. Indeed, in some restaurants it would be hard to find anybody with his/her unemployed hand/hands properly placed in his/her lap. Which is to say, with a fussy elaboration that betrays my still-surviving fear, over the last fifty years I have found nothing to support the claim that Well-Behaved People Simply Do Not Put Their Elbows on the Table, a nasty little verbal smack on the wrist delivered to this unsuspecting culprit who had her elbows propped innocently on the table around which our group of twelve gathered three times a day in the dining hall of Wooten House.
And a related example: during the last presidential election I discovered I could no longer distinguish exactly who the candidates were referring to when they mentioned “the middle class” they were so intent on helping in one way or another. And yet at one period of my life I knew exactly who was lower, lower-middle, middle, upper-middle, lower-upper, upper, and upper-upper class, and I knew, moreover, what clothes they wore, what drinks they craved, and what words they misused, plus hundreds of other characteristics that identified them as being irredeemably what they were. I paid attention to these things because it was obvious that in order to better herself, any lower-middle-class-just-this-side-of-white-trash person needed all the help she could get, and a lot of the things she needed to know were available for easy consumption because the girls on the third floor of Wooten talked of nothing else, morning, noon, and night, week in, week out, for months at a time, until we were released into the blessed relief of summer vacation. (It’s strange to have these arcane and totally forgotten bits of information bubble up in your head from time to time. For example, do you remember that one of the most victimized groups in America is made up of debutantes from [End Page 150] third-tier American cities like Indianapolis, Indiana; Columbus, Ohio; and Norfolk, Virginia?)
I think somebody at our institution, probably somebody in the dean’s office, assigned roommates freshman year on the assumption that one would feel most comfortable with one’s own kind. Since my father managed the Coca-Cola bottling company in Owensboro, Kentucky, it was only natural that my roommate would be Becky, whose father ran a shoe store in Massachusetts. It probably seemed perfectly likely to somebody in the dean’s office that Becky and...