LOSING GROUND
After I'd spent a few days at home, my folks loaded my stuff in the car and drove me the hour to Northern Illinois University, where I was to attend my first quarter. I was finally a college girl.
It seemed as if half my high school was at NIU. So it was easy to find people to party with every weekend.
But I studied, too. Every night — from Monday through Thursday — I holed up in the library. I was determined to prove myself, to show my parents I could succeed if I set my mind to it. When grades came out at the end of the quarter I had a perfect 4.0 average.
As further evidence of my responsibility, when I came home for the summer I landed a full-time summer job in the downtown Chicago office of an insurance firm — a branch of the company I'd worked for in Wisconsin. And the pay was even better than before. I wrote in my journal:
I'm excited to begin a new job, but even more elated to go to work from nine to five. At five o'clock my worries, problems, and responsibilities end! What I'm really trying to say is that I'll have no homework, or tests, or assignments to begin or finish after working hours.
If my parents were reassured by my good grades and my ability to find steady work, I very quickly let them know my newfound successes didn't mean I still couldn't do what I wanted. After almost a year away from my hometown. I had a lot of catching up to do. The entire summer served as one long reunion/celebration party. I awakened most mornings nursing a hangover, and my mother's periodic nagging produced the same effect as trying to douse a campfire with gasoline. I don't think either of us thought we would survive the summer in the same house.
Fall finally came, and I returned to school to discover that my academic showing the previous spring had earned me the honor of membership in the university's honor sorority, Alpha Lambda Delta. My parents accepted the school's invitation to attend the induction ceremony and a special reception with the school's administration.
I think the occasion offered my parents a glimmer of hope, a surprising moment of parental pride after almost three years of frustration and disappointment. As the speaker droned on about values like leadership and commitment, I looked around at the girls being inducted with me and felt terribly uncomfortable and out of place — partly because I realized I was wearing a dress for the first time since I'd come to college, but mostly because none of these honor roll students were my friends, nor did I want them to be. So when my name was called and I had to walk across the stage to receive a rose and a certificate of membership, it seemed more of an embarrassment than an honor.
After that ceremony, my motivation for studying began to erode. Consequently, I spent a lot more of my fall term partying than I spent in the library.
Ben and Alex, the two Arlington guys Trish had introduced me to, were both NIU students that fall. So when they took up rugby playing, my suitemate Connie and I got interested in the rugby scene.
A lot of ex-high-school football players, those who weren't quite dedicated enough for college football, joined the university rugby club. There would be a match almost every Saturday against the rugby team of some other midwestern university. It always took place on some peripheral college field, where the periodic, distant roar of the crowd crammed into the football stadium could be heard. Rugby, though fiercely competitive, was much more a fraternal, social happening than it was a public spectacle.
On Saturday night, after the match, both teams and their friends would get together and party. And on Sunday, before the visiting team members headed home to their campus, the home team would host a big picnic for the visitors. There would be kegs of beer to drink and everyone would get blasted.
Perhaps the biggest event of the fall came when Connie and I traveled down to Champaign to stay with one of Connie's friends for the University of Illinois's homecoming celebration. We arrived at the U of I campus midafternoon on Friday in order to get the earliest possible start on two straight days of partying.
Late Friday afternoon we sat in a dorm room, waiting for Connie's friend Dawn to finish dressing for our night on the town. Dawn paused in the middle of applying her mascara and reached into a dresser drawer. Pulling out a small vial of pills, she asked, "You ever try Quaalude, Becky?"
"No," I responded. "What'll it do?"
"Everything slows down," she said. "Like slow motion. And then you'll laugh and laugh. Try one."
So I took it and waited for something to happen. "How long does it take?" I asked after a few minutes.
"Depends," Dawn answered. "Usually not long. Aren't you feeling anything?"
"I don't think so."
We left for town a few minutes later. By the time we reached the first bar, I decided the Quaalude wasn't going to affect me and began downing beer until I was rip-roaring drunk. Then the Quaalude finally hit and hit hard. I don't remember going back to the dorm.
I woke up very late the next morning with such a bad hangover I had to drink a few beers to numb the pain enough to make the football game. I drank some more while I watched, and that evening went out for some serious partying. Dawn and Connie met and hit it off with a couple of guys. When they left together, I went with some students I'd met during the evening back to their dorm, where we finished off a variety of hard liquor they had stashed in their room. It was a mixed group and one of the guys made a few passes at me. He was cute, so we necked for a while until I passed out.
When I opened my eyes, the strange surroundings came slowly into focus and I remembered the party. Trying to judge the time by the semidarkness outside the window I thought, It can't be too long until dawn. Dawn. Where is she? I don't even know where her dorm is from here. Quickly and quietly, I got to my feet and tried to stand perfectly still until the room stopped spinning. Then I slipped out of the room, down the hall, and out into the chill of a fall morning. For the next half hour I wandered around the campus without another soul in sight, searching for a building that looked like Dawn's dorm.
When I finally found it and let myself in, Connie and Dawn were still asleep. I lay down and promptly went to sleep myself, waking up just in time to catch our mid-day ride back to NIU.
"We had a great weekend," Connie and I assured Dawn as we bid her good-bye. But as the Illinois farm country rolled by outside the car window on the way back, I had to acknowledge a real sense of disappointment. I couldn't remember enough of the weekend to recall what had been so great about it.
I spent a lot of my time at NIU with my suitemate Connie. She'd go to a lot of the rugby parties with me, and we'd go out together many weekends. But as the quarter wore on, I began to wonder whether we wouldn't be better friends if we didn't live so close to each other.
Connie was the kind of girl who had everything going for her. She climbed out of bed in the morning with every hair in place. Her parents were rich and she had so many clothes she could go for weeks without repeating an outfit. She'd offer to let me borrow anything I liked in her closet, but we both knew it would never fit. She'd been blessed with one those petite and shapely figures that never seemed to change no matter how many candy bars or ice cream sundaes she consumed.
Guys she met in class would call her up for dates, but she turned most of them down. She not only had self-confidence, but to top it all off, she had the self-discipline and brains to make good grades, too.
She never flaunted what she had. But I knew she knew she had it all. And as the quarter passed, that grated on me.
The one area in which I could outdo her was drinking. I kept the refrigerator in our suite stashed full of little seven-ounce beer bottles we called "Little Mickeys." We'd often get a group together on our floor to play the drinking board game "Pass Out" before we went out partying at the local bars. But Connie always seemed to be holding back in our drinking contests, never willing to let go and lose control. I'd begin my weekend partying on Thursday nights, but Connie would wait until Friday. So she didn't miss many Friday classes like I did.
I built quite a reputation as a drinker — putting away as many as twelve to fifteen beers a night, four nights a week. Drinking was the social ticket that not only helped me fit in, it got me in. On Sunday afternoons, for example, Doug and John, a couple of friends from home — the same two guys Wendy and I had run around with the summer before my sophomore year — would invite me to their fraternity house. There five or six of us would watch the football games on television and drain a whole keg of beer bought for the occasion. I'd usually be the only girl there, but they'd treat me like one of the guys because they knew I could drink with the best of them.
I remember running into Doug at a bar in town and having him introduce me to his friends. "She'll fit right in," he assured them. "She's a real lush."
Everyone laughed. And I laughed along with them. I was so glad to have Doug's friendship and acceptance that I didn't think of it as a derogatory comment. I still had something of a crush on Doug since that fourth of July night years before when he'd given me my first grown-up kiss. I kept looking for some clue that he felt the same thing toward me. From time to time I thought I noticed more than a fraternal, drinking-buddy feeling in his attitude toward me. But when I'd respond by clinging to him at parties, or asking him to slow dance, he'd back off and act cool toward me for the next few days.
My academic life went the way of my social life. My grades dropped to 3.0 for the fall and kept right on going down as winter quarter started. A couple of weeks into January I dropped my anatomy class because I could tell it was going to require too much studying just to pass. That left me with only three classes, the minimum load I could carry and still be considered a full-time student with the privilege of living in the dorm.
Connie and I remained friends, but we spent less and less time together. She studied even more than she had in the fall — and I hardly studied at all. We'd go out on some weekends, but she almost always left the bar or the party before I really got started. She stuck to her personal rules of only drinking on weekends despite the fact that I would start partying on Wednesday nights now, instead of on Thursday nights.
One blustery, cold Monday evening in January when I was feeling bored, I remembered Monday was ladies' night in the downtown bars. I didn't even bother asking if anyone would like to go to town with me for a few drinks. Everyone was busy.
I walked back to my room disappointed, thinking, I'm not going out drinking alone! But I felt the need for a drink and I no sooner flopped down on my bed and picked up a textbook than I decided to go anyway. I'll find someone I know in town, I assured myself as I bundled up and hurried out of the dorm.
I stopped right inside the bar door and waited for my eyes to adjust to the light. Then as nonchalantly as I could, I slipped to the bar, climbed up on a stool, and coolly ordered a beer. I turned and surveyed the entire establishment as if I were looking or waiting for someone who was supposed to meet me there. After three or four beers, two college kids walked in — not actually friends, but people I knew by name. I waved, and seeing I wasn't with anyone else, they motioned me over. I drank a few more beers and made small talk with them for a while before heading back to campus by myself, satisfied that at least I hadn't had to drink alone. It paid to have friends!
But I wasn't fooling myself. I admitted my growing discouragement in a daily journal my English instructor assigned us to keep.
Sunday seems the traditional day of the week for rest and depression.
Today was really slow and sad. I felt like I just wanted to go home and stay there for an endless period of time. I longed for my own soft bed and a long, hot bath. I am homesick.
Even watching The Wizard of Oz made me feel worse. Like knowing I've grown up too quickly and will never be ten years old again.
The next day I wrote:
Today resembled a fuzzy daydream. I kept napping, then awakening in a dazed world. I felt physically and mentally ill, and kept wondering if the previous day's depression had this effect. I felt useless, like I had no real purpose or function in living.
And a few days later:
I leave myself with this one thought to look back on: This week has been so depressing, it couldn't get any worse!
Depression seemed to be taking its toll in various ways. And my journal recorded my deepening malaise:
I fail to understand why I sleep in the afternoon when I should be studying and then try to study late at night when I should be sleeping. (Any explanations?)
Determination involves self-discipline. How can a person improve on his self-discipline?
One Saturday morning I caught a ride home with Doug and John and a couple of their friends. The plan was just to do laundry, go to the bank, run a few errands, and say hi to a few friends before heading back to school in time to party that night. However, on the drive back to school in the late afternoon, we got an early start on the partying when we stopped and picked up a case of beer to drink on the way.
About halfway back to NIU, I got desperate for a bathroom stop. Doug laughed, and making some comment about not being able to hold my beer, threatened to see if I could make it all the way back to campus. When I convinced him I was desperate, he pulled off at the next exit and wheeled into a Holiday Inn parking lot.
As I closed the door and hurried into the lobby, I heard one of the guys in the backseat say, "Why don't we just leave her here?" I felt sure he was just kidding, but not absolutely certain.
When I hurried out a few minutes later and found the car gone, I felt a surge of panic. I strained, looking up and down the parking lot. Nothing. I figured it was just a joke, but I still felt hurt and insecure. When I finally spotted them parked around the corner of the building, they all laughed. I didn't think it was funny and began to worry that maybe they didn't like me.
My relationship with Connie seemed to be deteriorating as well. We never had any real fights — just a lot of silence — and we spent less and less time together.
I would try to get her to go with me to parties. "Doug would sure like to see you," I'd tell her. Doug did have something of a crush on her. I was beginning to think maybe that was his only interest in me — just a way to get next to Connie. I decided if that was true, I couldn't blame him for using me. I was using Connie, too. The main reason I wanted her to go with me to parties wasn't that I wanted her company, but because I knew she was someone people wanted at a party. She was my ticket. If people liked me it was because they liked her.
Without her I felt out of place and unwanted at parties, and I ended up drinking more than ever to wipe out those feelings of insecurity.
I did get invited to a big frat party one Saturday near the end of the term. The guests, including a number of visitors I didn't know from U of I, made the beer disappear almost as fast as the hosts could roll out a new keg. And as usual, I downed more than my share.
The fraternity guys began singing drinking songs with the crudest lyrics I'd ever heard in my life. The drinking and the singing looked as if they'd go on all night. I had more beers than I could count and began to feel very woozy. So, leaving the booze and the bawdiness behind, I wandered into a bedroom, climbed onto a mountain of coats on the bed, and promptly dozed off.
I came to as someone roughly rolled me over. I opened my eyes to see a drunken guy standing over me. Another stranger's face, leering from beside him, came slowly into focus as I felt their hands and realized what was going on. They were pulling off my clothes!
Suddenly sober and wide awake, I kicked at them and screamed.
"Get away! Leave me alone!"
Now they were laughing. One of them pinned me down. My screams weren't much of a defense.
The next instant, a familiar face appeared at the doorway. "What's —"
"Doug! Help me! Please! Help!" I screamed.
As Doug stepped into the room, the two guys backed away. I jumped to my feet, pulled my clothes back into place, grabbed my coat, and bolted out of the party.
Shocked and badly shaken by what had almost happened, I ran back to my room. There I wept in despair at the realization of how messed up my life was. My grades were plummeting. I didn't have any friends. Now this.
I felt more down, more defeated than ever before. Knowing there was no way I could go on, I got up the next morning and called home.
"I'm quitting school," I told my mom. "I want to come home." I couldn't bring myself to add "again."
There was a long silence on the other end of the line before my mother asked, "How are we going to make it?"
"I'll be busy," I assured her. "I'll work downtown and take classes part-time at the University of Illinois Circle Campus. I'll have to study. I won't be around much. It won't be like before."
My mother sighed. "I don't know . . ."
"I'll change," I promised. "You'll see. I'll obey you. I'll do whatever you want me to do. I'll get it together there. I just want to come home."
Another long silence. "Okay."
So I packed up my things, bummed a ride back home with a friend, and never went back to Northern Illinois University again. I never even told Connie or my other suitemates that I was leaving.