Page 198 - WhyAsInY

Why (as in yaverbaum)
streets of Brooklyn, perhaps a tan raincoat could do the trick, doubling as a sport jacket. It did, and thus began in earnest an encounter with more of a culture clash than obtained when Kee-Wah met Brookwood.
As I think back on it, I should have realized that I was in for a change when I received a list of what I could expect to find in my room when I settled in for my freshman year. Now I ask you, how many boys from Brooklyn had a “chiffonier” in their bedrooms? Was there anything that I could leave at home because there would be a chiffonier in my room? Would I be able to keep my chiffonier in my dresser? How do you pro- nounce it? What do I say when I want someone to pass a chiffonier to me? Was this some kind of test? Here was a piece of apparatus that I clearly had no experience with, nor did I expect any other frosh to know what it was. As Ezra Pound, not himself likely to have been a lover of boys from Brooklyn, had said in another context, “Wrong from the start—.” Let’s just say that there were many who did know; they were usually the type that knew that Exeter was not just a street in Manhattan Beach (and that Exeter’s first name was Phillips).
I knew that not everybody who would be my classmate would be from Brooklyn, and I was looking forward to rooming with someone who wasn’t. That way, once we became friends, or at least allies in a new and scary environment, which would be likely to happen when we had to decide who got which bed and started to unpack objects that were alien to the other person, I would have a quick start in the enculturation process. I might even share my ignorance of chiffoniers with him—in confidence, of course. I knew that I would have a roommate with whom I was likely to be compatible because I had received a lengthy question- naire that contained questions that I gleaned were intended to produce just that result: What music do you like? Do you stay up late? Do you sleep with the window opened?
Wrong again. I did not know that Amherst sometimes put freshmen in singles. Moreover, I did not know that there was an entire dormitory devoted to singles, Morrow Hall. That dorm was named after Dwight Morrow, whose life, it transpired, had a trajectory somewhat like mine: he was an Amherst graduate who went to Columbia Law School, joined
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