Following

Following


In 1978 I transferred as a junior from a small state college in Vermont to a large university 1200 miles from Vermont. I flew for the first time landing in Chicago and transferring to a small loud airplane that landed in an Iowa corn field. A young woman with blond hair at the car rental desk did not have any arms. Fascinated, I watched as she wrote and answered the phone expertly with her feet. The limousine bound for the University of Iowa transferred me and other students from the small airport in the cornfield to our dorms.

My room mate was a boyish girl with red hair and a passion for football, beer and parties. She could have been a model for my opposite. Our room stayed divided into messy and neat. Most of the time we got along plus it helped that the girl with the single room across the hall moved out in the beginning of the semester to live with a forty-five year old boyfriend named Sonny. I took over her room to work on homework and be alone.

Slowly I became friends an undergraduate journalism student, graduate piano student and graduate art history major. I mostly liked my classes and was happy although I was young and still on shaky ground in some areas. Walking back from the library at night I carried my keys between my fingers as though I was going to fend off the man who was probably not a student but had made his way into the library exposing himself to me and a few others.

If I was lucky I would run into someone from my dorm so we could walk home together. Once I walked home with a nursing student who seemed to have a pleasant personality. As we walked the ten or so blocks in the dark towards our dorm we talked about the usual things. She was from a Chicago suburb, majoring in nursing, had two younger brothers, took figure skating through high school, entered a few competitions but now just wanted to be a nurse. I liked her because she seemed like a serious student who was friendly though probably not a partier. Even though she was a science student she seemed interested in my major of English with an emphasis in creative writing. As we continued walking, the conversation turned towards some of the odd things we had experienced on campus.

When I told her about the man exposing himself in the library, she told me about a similar experience that she had in the student union. We both reported it and were asked to visit a security officer in his office who was collecting similar reports. As we talked my eyes wandered to the edges of buildings, faces made distorted by the dark and the increasing amount of bushes along the sidewalk. I felt a little lost yet confident that I was with a nice person who was headed in the same direction. We reminisced about the discomfort we both had felt when the University of Iowa beat Iowa State in football and the entire town, except for a few people like us, was swaying from alcohol. When I walked into my dorm room there was a flood of beer on the floor because my room mate had apparently purchased a faulty keg. We laughed yet felt more acutely aware of the strangeness of being away from home. Even the size of the big ten campus and the size of the Iowa farm boys who ate a dozen eggs for breakfast was unfamiliar to us.

As we walked I noticed less dark building corners, less real faces and more dark bushes that seemed to hold dark shapes. The conversation turned again to the more subtle topic of boys. She had developed an interest in a premed student who lived in our dorm. He was enthusiastic about Buddhism giving him needed focus on his premed classes. Their frequent long conversations led to her meditating in her dorm room every day for an entire hour and attending Buddhist gatherings with him so they could chant together. Then, after several weeks of meditating and chanting she found herself alone with him in his dorm room and threw herself at him. His eyes stayed open with the same detached look she had seen when they were chanting.

“Then what happened,” I said stepping over a root on a dirt path and wondering why we were off the sidewalk.

“He said he had to study for a test in the morning and I went back to my dorm room.”

As we walked I stared into the bushes now surrounding me on both sides. I told her that I was in love with my creative writing teacher who was a graduate student in the Iowa Writers Workshop, had long curly hair and an attractive smile. At the beginning of the semester he had given us the assignment to keep a journal about how we interacted with the world as writers. Every night I locked myself in the single dorm room abandoned by the girl who was in love with the forty-five year old man named Sonny and poured my heart into the journal and short stories assigned by my creative writing teacher. The dirt path narrowed. The nursing student looked at me.

“Did anything ever happen?”

I looked at the looming bushes alive with disturbing possibility.

“What”

“With your creative writing teacher?”

“When I was in his office for a conference his knee accidentally bumped into my knee. I moved my knee away and he moved his knee to touch my knee again.”

Now we were stopped.

“How did we get here,” said the nursing student who had been a victim of a campus perv then neglected by a premed Buddhist.

I looked at the threatening plants surrounding us on all sides and hoped that my new friend would not tell anyone about my feelings for my teacher.

“I was following you back to our dorm. I thought you knew the way.”

"I was following you,” she responded. “I thought you knew the way.”

We then made it back safely to our dorm with only a few scratches.