End of Summer

I was 21 and I wore bell bottoms and peasant dresses. I listened to Cat Stevens and James Taylor. I read “Henry IV, Part One,” “Motivation and Personality,” and “The Female Eunuch” by Germaine Greer. At parties, I drank Boone’s Farm Strawberry Hill, smoked pot, and ate chips with French onion dip. In the Student Union, I hung out in the Carnation Room with the other theater majors. I drank coffee, puffed Virginia Slim Menthols, and laughed, performing my part in the show.

I got a temp job waiting tables at the Dutch Pantry Restaurant, costumed in a pinafore apron and white winged hat. I served vacuum-packed meals revived in boiling water — meatloaf, pot roast, chicken and dumplings. Fake fresh food.”

I shared a one-bedroom apartment with Donna and Kathy and walked six blocks to campus, the acrid, red odor from the Heinz Tomato Factory stewing in the air.

In my journal, I wrote “I’m determined to be the real me.”

I played Paula Frothingham in “End of Summer,” my hair coiffed in a 1940s style that Donna said looked like a rat sitting on my head. The theater majors dubbed the show “End of Theater.”

I auditioned for “Hail Scrawdyke.” Rejected. And “Henry IV.” Rejected again.

I played the daughter in “Tomorrow Through Any Window.” In a bed downstage left, I simulated masturbation and orgasm. I’d never had an orgasm. The theater majors said it was my best work ever.

I declared a second major in psychology because I was no longer sure I wanted to be an actress because I was fascinated with the world of the mind because I was fascinated with my Personality Theory professor because I was afraid to graduate two quarters early and face the “real world.”

I applied to grad school in theater because I did want to be an actress and was afraid to face the “real world.”

I decided to be an actress and a psychologist. Or, at least to marry a psychologist.

I had a fight with Donna and Kathy about who knows what and didn’t speak to them for weeks.

In my journal, I quoted Germaine Greer: “. . . emotional security . . . is the achievement of the individual.”

I fell in love for the first time with a future rabbi even though I’d rejected Judaism and knew he was moving to Israel. I fell in love for the second time with a PhD student in psychology even though he was married. He was unhappy, he said, and I hoped he’d leave his wife. I almost fell in love for the third time, with the Personality Theory professor. In his office, I sat on his lap and smoked his cigarettes, my hands shaking. “You should think about the control you exert in our relationship,” he said. He was 49 and also married.

I had sex in the wood-paneled family room of my parents’ house with the first man I loved; on the floor of the living room of my apartment with the guy who played my brother in play number two; in the apartment of a PhD student in philosophy who said I looked like Barbra Streisand and convinced me to study Transcendental Meditation to calm my mind (it didn’t work.) I had sex in the Holiday Inn with my married lover and sex with him in the sublet I rented for the summer, so I could be close to him until I left for grad school.

My insides burned from acid reflux.

I couldn’t sleep.

I wept and wept and wept.

I tried on experiences as if they were new clothes on a rack.

In my journal, I wrote “I wonder if anything means anything.”

I got a temp job waiting tables at the Dutch Pantry Restaurant, costumed in a pinafore apron and white winged hat. I served vacuum-packed meals revived in boiling water — meatloaf, pot roast, chicken and dumplings. Fake fresh food. When I refused to work late one night because my love affair was crashing, and I was crashing, and I wanted only to go back to the apartment and wait for my lover to call — to PLEASE CALL — the manager yelled, “You’re fired.”

I didn’t care. The job was shit. My relationship was doomed. I was flying to grad school in three weeks, conflicted or not. I whipped off my apron and threw it at her. The customers watched. I stomped out — a grand exit.

I didn’t stick around for the reviews.