Teaching Mrs. Dalloway

Beth said she would buy the alcohol herself.

For the rest of us had our work cut out for us. The floor needed to be Swiffered; our valuables had to be tucked away into our socks. The boys from across the quad were coming. But then, we thought, what a night we would have—as sparkling and flirty as our cocktails.

What a lark! What a plunge!

________

Of course Beth couldn't buy the alcohol herself, not really. Like the rest of our suite, she was only nineteen. But with the assistance of her older sister, she was able to keep her promise. She returned to Yale after winter break with a trunkful of cocktails waiting to be made. When she pulled up to the curb where we were waiting, the bottles rolled and clanged like church bells.

On our walk to dinner, Beth listed the types of liquor she'd acquired. We crossed in front of the library and cut toward Commons, the January moon swinging cold and white above us. All we needed now, she told us, were the mixers.

"Easy!" I said. "I've got some great ideas for party games."

It took me a second to process my mistake. I'd never hosted such a party before. I didn't drink or smoke in high school, and I hadn't been invited to hang out with the people who did. Beth didn't want icebreakers, card tricks, or name tags. She wanted juices and sodas. She laughed, then, at my naïvety—everybody did. But Beth laughed a little longer, and in her tone there was something sharper.

________

When I teach my first college literature class, it is January in Chapel Hill. The snow always startles us, falling and vanishing in a matter of hours. I've called the course Echoes and Transformations. The idea is that we read one novel and then another that was inspired by it. Our first text is Mrs. Dalloway.

My students pick it up with skepticism, flip through it, scrawl a few notes, and put it down again. During our class discussions they are indifferent. Bored. Nothing happens, they say. A snob gives a party. Where's the story in that?

At night I curl up on my tattered red sofa, the dog snoring beside me, the lights ablaze, the book in my hands. My husband is loading the dishwasher after our friends have gone home. We often argue right before guests arrive; he calls me Mrs. Dalloway because I tie myself in knots trying to please everyone, trying to be the perfect hostess. Should I share this piece of information with my students? If I do, what will their reaction be? Will they appreciate the novel more—will it personalize the book, offer them another entry point—or will they like it even less?

—they had heaps of theories, always theories, as young people have. It was to explain the feeling they had of dissatisfaction; not knowing people; not being known. For how could they know each other? You met every day; then not for six months, or years. It was unsatisfactory, they agreed, how little one knew people.

In that freshman-year suite, we all had our roles to play. Lissa was the California premed, forever falling in love. Greta was the exuberant, theatric New Yorker. I was the Midwesterner: baby-faced and wholesome. I wore pink slippers to raucous parties on the fifth floor. I spent Saturday nights on the phone with my long-distance boyfriend, missing home so fiercely that I'd cry.

How irritating I must have been to Beth, who was almost always sprawled on the mattress four feet below mine. How many whispered fights and intimacies must she have been forced to hear? Her role in our suite was the Cynic: sardonic and dark and aloof. Her half of our closet contained nothing brightly colored, nothing pastel. Her nails were black and gleaming, her hair stiff with rust-colored dye. She would spend two hours showering and applying makeup that turned her face waxy and pale, then pick up her bag...