There remained the stoutish woman breathing audibly, brooding upon me as I sat, penitent and stubborn, on the carpet a few feet away. At last she said, exasperated, "Elise-no, Alicia?-if you are telling the truth, and not simply protecting another girl or girls, you will have to cease this-unnatural behavior. At once! Or I will notify the Dean of Women! And if you are not telling the truth-if you are lying to me, at this moment, I-I will have to notify the Dean of Women." I was staring at Mrs. Thayer's swollen ankles. I could not bring myself to contradict her, to point out that my name was neither "Elise" nor "Alicia" nor was it a name that resembled these names. I could only repeat, quietly, "But I am telling the truth, Mrs. Thayer-what would be my motive in lying?"

The question was an appeal; yet not an appeal Mrs. Thayer could have answered. It was a question put to the Void.

Mrs. Thayer was trying to push herself up from the sofa, leaning on the armrest; her breath came short, her fleshy face was raddled and drawn with fatigue. I sprang up quickly to help her. Her weight on my arm was warm and livid. Once Mrs. Thayer had regained her feet, however, she pushed from me; her eyes shone with indignation. Turning to leave, fluttering her beringed hands, making a snorting sound of bemused disgust-"You may tidy up in here, you strange, perverse gurl. I accept your apology. But if ever you repeat such behavior, I shall notify the Dean of Women, I shall demand your expulsion from this house."

I murmured in her wake, "Yes, Mrs. Thayer."

Following that hour, neither my Kappa sisters nor Mrs. Thayer ever trusted me again.

For how could I explain to Mrs. Thayer Better to think that there is only one responsible, and not many. Better to think that the universe is rational and you might come to know a tiny portion of its truth, however false that truth.

Next morning I wakened in the winter dark before dawn. I was out of the prison-house before 7:00 a.m. The kitchen help was arriving but would not take notice of me. Nor would I speak to anyone. I'd avoided the upstairs of the house in order to avoid my sisters' averted eyes. I understood that my roommate, who'd lent me her makeup, who'd offered to put up my hair in rollers, had been shamed by my behavior. And she toys she has leprosy! I want another roommate. I hate her. I'd lain on the tattered couch in the basement study room planning the remainder of my life. Or did the remainder of my life come spinning past me like a comet trailing flame. I was panicked to have lost Ida: when I tried to recall my mother, I could see only the dog-eared snapshots. I did not see a living woman, I saw the black-and-white two-dimensional snapshots my grandmother had begrudgingly allowed me to examine as a little girl. No sticky fingers! my grandmother had cautioned me. Yet the snapshots collected loose in the album often stuck together.

At the registrar's office in Erie Hall I was told I'd come too early. "But can't I work now? Isn't my work ready for me now?" The urgency in my voice might have alarmed the administrative assistant, a youthful middle-aged woman who'd taken an interest in me as a scholarship student, and who'd always seemed fond of me; the bond between us had been broken like a cobweb, for I'd come to work in the morning and not in the afternoon, and there was no place for me. And my hair was uncombed, my eyes unnaturally dilated, and the lids were inflamed and smeared with greasy silver-green eye shadow. Where I went next, in the sub-freezing air, as a glaring opalescent sky gradually lightened overhead, I wouldn't clearly remember. To Auburn Heights, possibly. Where a German shepherd barked excitedly at me as I stood hesitantly at the mouth of the alley lined with trash cans. A gritty snow-crust lay over everything, like hardened plastic. I did not believe I was hungry, yet I knew I should eat; yet the dog barked, barked; he was Cerberus barking me away, I had no choice but to retreat. My breath came in steaming pants and ice rivulets hardened beneath my eyes where tears ran down my cheeks. Around my head, tied like a scarf, I wore a soiled gray woollen muffler; it was of good quality, I'd found it in a carton of curb-side trash on Genesee Street a few blocks from the sorority. As I walked, hiking across snowy stretches of the hilly campus, my lips moved silently. Don't hate me! All I wanted was for both of you to be proud of me. Not only my mother's face was fading from my memory, my father's face was fading, too. He'd been dead more than a year. Strength is required to retain the faces of the dead and my strength which I'd always taken for granted, a frantic nervous strength like a rat rushing through a maze, was draining from me. I'd written to my grandmother asking her to send me one or two snapshots of my father, but my grandmother never replied. My father's body had never been recovered; no death certificate had been sent to Strykersville, that I knew of; when one of my sorority sisters asked, as if suddenly suspicious, maybe Deedee had primed her, where my father lived, I'd said he'd gone to Smithereens. She'd asked What? as if she hadn't heard right and I said He's gone to Smithereens, it's a town in the Rocky Mountains. Maybe someday your father will go there, too.

In European Philosophy there was a girl hunched in her coat, seated in an outermost row beneath tall glaring windows. Where other students took dutiful notes, the girl stared avidly at the professor lecturing in a calm, droning voice on the problem of God's existence. Plato and Aristotle, St. Augustine, Francis Bacon and Spinoza, Voltaire, Kant and German Idealism… The girl's skin was luridly pale and her dark, sunken eyes unnaturally alert. She'd shoved both her fists deep into her coat pockets. She searched for a pen, the pen flew from her fingers and rolled along the worn, varnished floor. Oh, ignore her. She's nuts. She's pathetic. Takes it all so seriously. Just wants attention. Other students glanced at the girl warily. No one was seated near her. The lecture room was a place of abstract thought and bodiless speculation; it was not an appropriate place to bring a body, still less a body quivering with emotion. Near the end of the class when the professor invited questions, you could see his crafty eyes avoiding the girl seated beneath the window, a trembling hand raised. These were academic questions, please! No emotion, please! In a nasal, urgent, quavering but stubborn voice the girl asked what sounded like If there is God in a book why are there so many books? Why would He manifest Himself in so many? There was a respectful silence. The professor frowned as if he were seriously considering this question and not calculating how many more minutes before the bell rang to end the class. The girl laughed nervously. Wiped at her eyes. No one wished to look at her. Instead of addressing the class in his customary manner, while answering an individual's question, the professor stood silent regarding the girl with somber eyes; at last he said he'd speak with her after class. You could see how he'd slipped the class list out of his manila folder to glance rapidly through it; he meant to ascertain the girl's name, for in the discomfort of the moment he'd forgotten her name. One of his most brilliant, vexing undergraduates, whose papers were three times as long as papers written by her classmates, invariably A's, and-he'd forgotten her name? Not on the list. Not on any list. Not registered at the university. Not registered in the Universe. Class ended, at last. Relief! The sickly pale girl remained seated, no she was managing to stand, in the aisle beneath a tall glaring window like a deranged eye of God smiling uncertainly to herself; a girl in an overcoat, so you wouldn't see her small girl-breasts lacking a Kappa pin to redeem their smallness; a girl rumored to put out; yet hardly knowing what put out must be, except something very ugly. An action involving, afterward, stiff crusted wads of tissue. The professor was waiting at the front of the room to speak quietly with her, his worried eyes drifting on and about her, but the girl failed to come forward; she moved her lips, silently, and she smiled; she was a quarrelsome girl, and too damned smart for her own good; everyone in her family, plus farm neighbors, relatives said this of her Too damned smart for her own good; the professor, placing his papers in his briefcase, snapping the briefcase shut, was pretending now not to notice the girl at the edge of his vision; possibly, in the exigency of the moment, for another student was coming forward to speak with him, he'd actually ceased to be aware of her.