Beware of Love in Technicolor Read Free

I preferred hiking Harvard Square to the Appalachian Trail. A day spent in the great outdoors involved a paperback around my best friend’s swimming pool.
                  I had the kind of charmed childhood that produces accountants and lawyers. Neighborhood block parties, gymnastics, little league softball, and family vacations to Orlando and Williamsburg, Virginia. Slumber parties, Girl Scout cookies, and church every Sunday. I was the girl who, in the middle of all that Americana bliss, read Bukowski and Kerouac, and dressed in head to toe black.
                  My mother loves movies, especially the old black and whites from the days before the summer blockbuster. She named both my brother and me after movie stars whom kids of our generation had never heard. My brother, Cooper, was named for Gary Cooper. She named me for her favorite actress, Greer Garson.
                  On a cold day in January, at recess in the fourth grade, Danny Keller was feeling like bullying someone.
                  “Here comes Greer the Queer!” he called out, cackling in that way only grade school bullies know how.
                  Luckily, I had a dad who encouraged my inner tomboy. I balled up my little fist and knocked Danny Keller flat on his ass. Gave him a bloody nose, and made him cry. To this day, I’m not sure how my brother kept the kids from calling him “Pooper.”
                  Somewhere in the middle of my sophomore year of high school, I decided to drop the punk rock thing. My best friend, Penny, and I started playing tennis. We shopped at Gap. I even bought a pair of penny loafers. I used dimes in place of pennies. I kept reading Bukowski and Kerouac.
                  I always envisioned college like the brochure claimed. Rolling green lawns, brick academic buildings with clock towers, students playing Frisbee or studying under a tree. I envisioned long, deep conversations about the world, midnight coffee runs, and long stretches at the library with my nose in some classic or another.
                  I chose the school for its English department and the assurance of a free ride. Not from a scholarship or anything promising like that, but from my parents. If I chose the state school, I would be student loan-free in four years. They even promised a car after two years in good standing.
    Besides, the brochure featured a nice photo of students playing Frisbee in the shade of the clock tower on the rolling green lawn
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    Maybe I should have skipped dinner that first night at school. I could have introduced myself to some of the other girls in The Pit, ordered a pizza, and gone over my class schedule. But I just had to see Ben again.
    The dining hall in our section of campus was like something out of an Ayn Rand novel: big, utilitarian, and impersonal. It was representative of a rush to accommodate more students in the seventies, built into a hill, with long ramps winding around each side of the building. Inside, you chose from the lesser of two lines, and wound yourself through a maze of ropes. You handed your student ID to a glorified lunch lady, who sat higher than the students in a cube of Plexiglass, for authorization to dine upon such de licacies as “chickwiches” and “spicy spinach tofu triangles.”
                  On mozzarella stick night the lines would wind their way outside the building onto the street outside, and the dining hall employees were instructed to serve only two sticks at a time. People would be sitting at their tables with six, seven, even eight or more plates towering and clattering on the tray in front of them. Just one of those funny things I remember.
                  On that first night, though, they served up cookout food: hot dogs, hamburgers, potato salad. It felt like summer camp. I remember feeling very annoyed by the efforts of the university to make us