A Martian in Connecticut

Tanya and I were the only two students in the entire Cluett dorm on a Saturday night in 1990.  Every single other student was away.  Even the internationals with nowhere to go found something to do that open weekend when boarders are allowed to go “home”.  It was us and Ms. E.  We were being disciplined … we were basically grounded.  The details are for another story, but it suffices to say it was due to an inappropriate drunken affair on a previous open weekend.

I parachuted into boarding school my senior year of high school.  I was from Brazil and was living in Morocco before showing up in Cluett Senior Hall at an all girl boarding school in what I considered “the middle of nowhere” Connecticut.  It’s ironic.  I considered Simsbury the middle of nowhere even if to many I was coming from the middle of nowhere.  Compared to the girls around me, many of whom had been friends and roommates for years, I was a three headed Martian.

I was completely unprepared for the experience.  I was rebellious.  And I got into a whole lot of trouble.  Fortunately for me, mail to Morocco where my parents still resided was very slow so by the time the letter stating I was one demerit away from being suspended arrived there and my mom called with the reprimand, it was old news and I had already worked myself out of the situation.  This all just explains the type of 17 year old I was. 

Tanya was in the dorm room next to mine and she was as crazy as I was at the time.  We had gone to her house for an open weekend, lied to her parents, got caught at a bar by a teacher,  and hit and ran with her moms car.  In short, we were in a whole heap of trouble.  The weird thing is that people who know me describe me as the nerdy one, the responsible one or the “good student”.  In my selective memory, I still think of myself like that and many times I was just that.  Other times, such as this one, it was quite a different story.

Figuring out who I was turned out to be complicated.  I did high school in three different countries where the world around my American school spoke different languages.  Fitting into boarding school, the more I think about it, was the hardest of them all.  Maybe my schoolmates did not see me as a three headed Martian.  Maybe the Martian was inside me. 

As I grow older and create my own family with my own values and making my own mistakes, I no longer feel like a Martian.  I feel like someone who can grow and change and mold and be whatever I need to be in order to make my life, and my family work at that moment.  I need to be the brave mother, the sensitive wife, the caring daughter.  I can’t be them all at the same time.  I need to change opinions because I learn, and sometimes my learning curve isn’t all that graceful.  But I know I make an honest attempt to be the best person I can be.  The person the God I believe in, wants me to be.  There are days I fall way short and someone is watching and judges me.  There are days when I totally hit the mark and my pride swells and I judge myself.  All this to say that who I really am is a moving target.

But that Saturday night in Cluett Hall, Tanya and I were sharing a bottle of vodka and talking about robberies and guys and stuff and we decided to take out a Widgi board.  We were going to call on the spirits to clear up all our doubts and teenage angst about the future.

I don’t know if it was my unconscious, my fingers or Tanya’s but that thing moved.  By golly did it move.  And when it did we both screamed and ran around and around the empty dorm screaming our heads out.  I can see it in a movie scene.  Two teenage girls in their pajamas and ponytails, running around an empty dorm with only the hall lights on.  They pass room by room, up and down the stairs, along one side of the building and round to the next.  From the outside, the evil spirit is looking in and following them, waiting for the perfect time to attack.

We ran around screaming for a while and somehow ended up hiding inside Tanya’s closet.  At this point fear and paranoia had completely taken over my already not too sober self.  As I sat uncomfortably on top of Tanya’s shoes it dawned on me.  A spirit would find me in a closet and now I was stuck with no where to run.  So in a faint and trembling voice I whisper to Tanya.

“Hey, the spirit can find us here.  It can see us through the wall”. 

She whispers back “what spirit?”

“The one that is after us?” I answer.

“You are running from a spirit?” she calls out rather loudly.

“Aren’t you?” I answer in a normal tone of voice.

“I am hiding from the robber!” and that is when both of us burst out in a belly laugh.  It was that laughter that comes from inside like a tsunami and takes over, and it is so funny and so powerful that I began to cry and she began to cry so now we are both sitting on her shoes half laughing and half crying thinking we are the best friends in the world.

But we were not. I don’t remember if it was Tanya or my other dorm mate who was expelled before the year was over.  I could check the yearbook but I am not sure where it is.  I do know that some years ago I received a notice from our school that Tanya had passed away.  I don’t know the circumstances, and I didn’t really venture to find out. 

Tanya, as many friendships I have had, come and go and change as I come and go and change.  It doesn’t make these friendships less valuable or real.  It makes them important for the time they lasted.  And for that time, for those months we were together at Cluett, Tanya knew me as well as I knew myself.

That Saturday night in Cluett was unforgettable.  It was fun and though no one else was there to share it with us, it somehow made me feel more part of a place that felt so strange.  Maybe the spirits of alumna past were indeed there, and maybe they summoned not to destroy us as in a cheap horror flick, but to welcome me, the three headed Martian, to the middle of nowhere Connecticut.