New wave night

Let's journey—shall we?—to the year 1983

“You seem like an Oberlin girl to me,” my high school college counselor said during our first meeting, at the beginning of my junior year. I wasn’t so sure I agreed.

I knew nothing about Oberlin except for that it was a very small school in the middle of nowhere in Ohio, and I didn’t think I wanted to go to college in Ohio. I had liked the Northeast during the three years I spent there in boarding school, and thought perhaps somewhere like Vassar was more my speed. But the counselor gave me an Oberlin catalog, and I liked what I read. It was the first college to admit Black students, and the first liberal arts college to award degrees to women. The town itself had been a key stop on the Underground Railroad. I liked that the student body had a reputation for being socially aware and politically active.

Oberlin also had a strong creative writing program, which I was very interested in, and a reputation for being a place where even misfit types found their people. Though boarding school had been an improvement for me from Houston, socially, I still felt like something of an outsider there. The more I found out about Oberlin the more convinced I was that it was the place for me. Even Ohio, I decided, would be OK.

I arrived at orientation in the fall of 1983 with my mom, my stereo, and more clothes than were probably strictly necessary. My roommate was a girl from Brooklyn Heights named Margaret. Her grandfather, she had disclosed, was a legendary art dealer—like famous enough that even I had heard from him—and she immediately struck me as more refined than me, more sophisticated. Most girls from New York, I would soon learn, seemed that way.

We both smoked—back then you could still smoke in the dorms—and you were assigned a smoking roommate. Margaret and I ate in the smoking section of Dascombe Dining Hall, and studied in the ground floor smoking section of the library, and after a while our social life, because of this, pretty much revolved around other smokers.