After Harvard, Danvers

The last gasp came in October.

Bitter spasm of emotion, relationship dead.

Neither of us expected it to last, of course--she tunneling towards thesis and medical school, me jabbing a reporter's typewriter in suburbia. Still, when it blew, I wasn't ready. Harvard was over.

Graduation the June before wasn't a graduation at all. The presumptuous red H's set in vanilla ice cream, the platitudes of college president and housemaster, didn't seem much different from the presumption and platitudes of the previous four years. It was just another day (albeit the last) at Harvard.

Summer brought more delusions. Sure I had a reporter's job in suburban Danvers. But there didn't seem much difference between that and the variety of other jobs I'd held summers earning money to pump into Mother Harvard's coffers.

The relationship of 18 months lingered on--a superficial symbol of what I still believed to be the status quo.

The crunch came in October as personal attachments went down the tube--a rancorous, belated graduation present.

Ripeness is all. You're never really prepared, it seems, for the end of anything--especially love affairs and college. And when they're packaged as a doubleheader, the effect is chilling.

A queer sense of emptiness takes over--a mild nausea of remembrance that seeps through daily routine. And of all the frustrations and traumas confronting you after leaving Harvard, that nausea, that emptiness spawned as the college community casts you out, is perhaps the toughest to deal with.

For me, a single in Danvers's bedroom community, it was particularly difficult. If you want to learn loneliness, try suburbia. And if you want to learn suburbia, try Danvers. A middle-class sprawl of shopping center parking lots, Astroturfed traffic islands, and ranch-style roosts for the not-quite-Ipswich commuter set, Danvers didn't make transition easier for me.

It wasn't so much that I disliked the town--I just had difficulty relating to it. My relationship with my neighbors, the just-married Connallys, is an example. I didn't dislike the Connallys, but there was a distinct absence of rapport.

Peter Landry '74 now lives in Middlebury, Vt. and works for the Burlington Free Press.

Key to this aloofness between us was Precious, a bastardized mouse of a chihuahua. Precious was the yin and yang of the Connally marriage--on any given night the pitch and frequency of the despicable creature's yaps would reveal the flow of the marital battle--the advances and retreats of the two sides, the victories, the losses.

There was more to Precious, of course, than vaps. The rodent was an emblem of a lifestyle, a get-married, settle-down, buy-a-house routine that seemingly afflicted everyone in Danvers as soon as high school closed its doors on them. Bereft of such designs, I had difficulty relating to people who would want the beast yapping underfoot.

With traditional neighbor-neighbor friendliness undermined. I found few avenues for social diversion.

The social schedule in Danvers was topped by he Glen Magna ball and antique show, and Twi-League baseball. Other than Route One's meat-on-he-hoof singles spots, the town's only after midnight establishment was Supreme Roast Beef.

You never really appreciate the luxury of accessible, stimulating surroundings until they're gone. Four years of Cambridge makes you fat and complacent--stimulus is routine there, served up like glop on the cafeteria line. It's departure is tangible.

If you're near enough to Cambridge, you try to stockpile the stimulus, greedily gathering it on short-term visits to take home and hoard until you're next in town. But it doesn't work.

The brick walls with their Ivy lattice become two-dimensional, depthless. Everything is theater with your role obscured.

Overextended, Harvard's stimulus dulls. The people and surroundings, so interesting while you were there, somehow seem to bore you.

At first you try to equate the change in us-and-them terms. The new generation just isn't as interesting, as committed, as your own, you argue.

But the strange new boredom is more than that. It's not so much that the people, the surroundings and issues, are less stimulating. They're just less stimulating than memory has made them. Or less stimulating than you think they ought to be.

It's the initiation into unbelonging.

One day it hits you that you no longer get worked up about which English professor screwed which class on which midterm exam, and you realize you're outside.

The realization brings the purge, consumation of the break. You cut off all your hair or change your wardrobe, try on new styles, sample different characters. You stop the Cambridge visits and mumble inarticulate responses when asked where you went to school.

After the blowout came two hard months. Caught between lines--Harvard to the rear, who knows what ahead--I floundered. The job offered little solace. It gobbled my energies and attention, but after work I still had to go home, and a two-room apartment, however small, is large alone.

Slowly, though, things began to coalesce. New interests brought new people. New people new relationships. The matrix began to make sense again.

I still missed Harvard--the discordant pastiche of people and philosophies, the confrontation and debate, the bid to make the world (at least your mound of it) a little more humane.

I still miss it, though sporadically. The brick and ivy, the crush of the Square, the swarms of class-goers evoke the patented responses in me.

Or maybe not. My longing is somehow hollow, ennervated. My niche is elsewhere.