Penelope

  REBECCA HARRINGTON

  Penelope

  Rebecca Harrington is a twenty-six-year-old writer living in New York City. She has worked at The Huffington Post and studied history and literature at Harvard and journalism at Columbia. Penelope is her first novel.

  FIRST VINTAGE CONTEMPORARIES EDITION, AUGUST 2012

  Copyright © 2012 by Rebecca Harrington

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

  Vintage is a registered trademark and Vintage Contemporaries and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Harrington, Rebecca.

  Penelope / by Rebecca Harrington. —1st Vintage Contemporaries ed.

  p. cm.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-95033-8

  1. Harvard University—Fiction. 2. College stories. I. Title.

  PS3608.A78196P46 2012

  813′.6—dc23

  2012003449

  www.vintagebooks.com

  v3.1

  For my beloved grandfather. Without his generous support, brilliance and extraordinarily dry sense of humor I could have never written this book.

  And that, thought Reginald, is the last essential quality of the millionaire. Knowing when to say, “Sorry, but I’ve got to go now.”

  —A. A. MILNE

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  About the Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  1 Letters of Note

  2 An Ice Cream Social

  3 A Death on the Nile

  4 In Which Penelope Reaches the Zenith of Her Literary Ambitions

  5 Caligula

  6 Penelope Attends a Disturbing Party

  7 Penelope Attends a Disturbing Party, Continued

  8 The Game

  9 “Romance in Nondomestic Surroundings”

  10 In Which Penelope Is Forced to Consider Her Living Arrangements

  11 In Which There Is Hardship

  12 The Performance

  13 Penelope, or Virtue Rewarded

  14 The Review

  Acknowledgments

  1.

  Letters of Note

  In the July before school started, Penelope Davis O’Shaunessy, an incoming Harvard freshman of average height and lank hair, filled out a survey about what type of roommate she was looking for. She felt she had accurately represented herself as someone who was not too messy while, at the same time, not too clean. Hopefully, she would end up with people who answered the same description.

  In August, the Harvard Admissions Office sent Penelope a brief note with the names of her future roommates and their contact information. One roommate, Emma Green, was from New York City, and the other, Lan Wu, was from Palo Alto, California. Penelope hesitated, unsure of whether to contact either of them. Luckily both contacted her before she could decide what to do about the matter.

  The first missive was from Emma, the resident of New York City:

  Hi, Penelope and Lan,

  I wanted to get the ball rolling on introductions, so I figured I’d tell you guys a bit about myself. My name is Emma and I’m from New York City. I can’t believe I’m going to be missing out on New York pizza and dry cleaning for a whole four years! I graduated from Spence and am thinking about concentrating in history, with maybe an eye toward law school. I am incredibly committed to my extracurricular activities and am especially interested in joining student government or the Institute of Politics. Go Schumer! Of course, I like to have a good time, if I ever get time to have it. Also I hear we are living in the worst building on campus. My mother is complaining.

  Emma

  Penelope was just about to wonder how it was possible to miss dry cleaning in any particular region when she received an e-mail from Lan of Palo Alto, California:

  Dear everyone,

  Yes, I am a smoker.

  Love,

  Lan

  Apart from this correspondence, Penelope’s summer was much like any other summer. She worked at an ice cream shop. She went to the beach. Occasionally, she pretended she was Julia Child and talked in a funny voice while cooking beef bouillon. Penelope was normal and typical in many respects. Thus she looked forward to college with a certain amount of pleasant apprehension and dread.

  When the day finally arrived, Penelope loaded all her possessions into the car and tumbled in next to her mother. Uncharacteristically, Penelope’s mother was silent for a while, but as soon as they got onto the highway, her eyes started filling up with tears. Then she said, “Oh my God, I can’t believe this is happening. I just can’t. Doesn’t it seem like two seconds ago that you were in high school?”

  “Yes, it does,” said Penelope.

  “I can’t believe it. It’s sad, but so exciting for you. I bet you will meet the best people.”

  “Probably tons of famous scientists,” volunteered Penelope.

  “Probably,” said her mother. There was a bit of a silence.

  “So what are you going to do once you are up there?” asked Penelope’s mother. She said this very casually, which made Penelope nervous.

  “How do you mean?” asked Penelope.

  “What I mean is, do you have any strategies for making friends at Harvard? How are you going to make a good impression? How will you introduce yourself?”

  “I don’t know,” said Penelope. “I was thinking I would strike a balance between friendliness and intelligent raillery.”

  “Um, OK,” said Penelope’s mother. “I mean, you can be friendly, but not too friendly. Sometimes silence is best. Especially in the beginning.”

  “I suppose,” said Penelope hesitantly.

  “It doesn’t do anyone good to be too enthusiastic, you know, because that can put people off. Just be friendly. Friendly and aloof.”

  “OK,” said Penelope. A reconciliation of opposites, she thought.

  “So let’s go through this. What are you going to say to people when you meet them?”

  “Hello.”

  “Penelope, seriously. Because, you know, I have heard you say some things that might put people off and you really have to be careful of that.”

  “What kinds of things? I don’t think I say anything weird,” said Penelope.

  “Penelope, I know what I’m talking about.”

  “See, I don’t,” said Penelope.

  “The car seat thing, for example. Whenever you bring that up, it is totally bizarre.”

  “What do you mean?” asked Penelope. “What car seat?”

  “Penelope, you know which car seat.”

  “You mean the car seat I sat in until I was in fourth grade? That’s an interesting anecdote. It is like something Noël Coward would say at a party.”

  “What?” said her mother. “It really isn’t.”

  “Fine,” said Penelope.

  “And you never even had scoliosis.”

  “But I was spiritually in a brace,” said Penelope. Her mother ignored her.

  “Why don’t you promote yourself? Why don’t you say that you are a National Merit Scholar?”

  “Who would want to know about that?” said Penelope sulkily.

  “Lots of people,” said her mother.

  “Not any famous scientists!” said Penelope. “They would find that very boring information. What do you want me to say? Hello, I am Penelope, I am a National Merit Scho
lar?”

  “No, you are missing the point of what I am saying,” said Penelope’s mother.

  “OK, except I am not,” said Penelope. They were silent until they got to Harvard.

  Penelope was duly awed. Harvard stretched languidly and impressively into the rest of Cambridge like a redbrick monopoly. It was larger and more obliquely Federalist than Penelope remembered and, if she thought about it, she was intimidated. To her right she saw a large clock tower; to her left she saw a tobacco shop filled with antique pipes. In the center she saw a gigantic Au Bon Pain.

  “Wow,” she observed to her mother.

  “I know,” said her mother. “I have never seen that big of an Au Bon Pain before either.”

  Penelope and her mother parked the car on a small cobblestone side street and followed several signs emblazoned with arrows and the word “Registration” in crimson filagree lettering. Eventually they arrived at a small table in the middle of Harvard Yard, the large field around which all the freshmen were going to live. The Yard was very impressive, a wide expanse of perfectly manicured lawns and pathways, surrounded by old brick dormitories. Penelope remembered Harvard Yard from her admissions brochure, specifically a picture of it where Abercrombie models were playing touch football in Harvard sweatshirts and disheveled cashmere bow ties. She was excited to live there. In her fantasies, Penelope pictured herself advocating for Title IX while attractively tackling several men at once.

  Two men were sitting at the registration table. Both were about twenty and one had a ponytail. They were laughing at something.

  “I know, man,” said one of them. “What would we do without old Fermat kicking us in the balls?”

  “Hello?” said Penelope.

  “Oh, hi,” said the ponytail while the first one recovered himself. “What can we do for you?”

  “I’m here to register. I’m a freshman. Penelope O’Shaunessy?”

  “O’Shaunessy, O’Shaunessy, ahh, here we are. You have two roommates, as you must already know by now, and you live in Pennypacker, which you also probably know. Here is your key. You live on the third floor …”

  “Um, where is Pennypacker?” asked Penelope. “Is it that one?” She pointed to a large brick building with a neoclassical stone porch. A handsome man with chin-length blond hair was walking past it. He was wearing a three-piece khaki linen suit and laughing into a cell phone, like the regent of a tiny, unpronounceable European principality. Penelope wondered if he was drifting toward the registration desk. It seemed as though he was going to.

  “Oh, no, it’s actually down past the library, across the street,” Ponytail said, pointing to an unseen building. Penelope craned her neck, but she was distracted by the blond man, who really was heading toward the registration desk.

  “But I thought all the freshmen lived here,” Penelope said.

  “Most all of them do,” Ponytail said. “You, on the other hand, live in a converted apartment building above a radio station.”

  “Oh,” said Penelope. She was disappointed but tried to hide it. The blond man was now within earshot.

  “The radio station is great though,” said Ponytail. “Sometimes they play music for twenty-two hours at a time, uninterrupted.”

  “Is that fun?” said Penelope.

  “Only if you like flutes, darling, and honestly, who does? In their heart of hearts,” said the blond man as he walked by. Then he was gone.

  Penelope walked to her dorm in dejection. Her mother was simply confused.

  “But I guess I just don’t understand where it is. Do you know where it is? Why is it over a radio station? Who was that guy?” she kept asking Penelope.

  “No. I don’t know,” said Penelope as she trudged past the library. She wondered if these were the dorms where Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber, had lived. She remembered from her experience reading conspiracy novels that when Ted Kaczynski was a freshman, he lived outside the Yard, which was apparently the place where the administration put the aberrations of the Harvard community. Penelope wondered what the admissions committee had thought about her. It was probably her essay on car seats that put them off.

  When they finally arrived at the dorm, Penelope and her mother were pleasantly surprised. It was redbrick and had white trim. Even if Pilgrims hadn’t actually lived in this building in particular, it still looked as if they could have. That was all that Penelope could have desired.

  “This is nice,” said Penelope’s mother. “I’m gonna get the car.”

  “OK,” said Penelope. “I’ll wait inside.”

  Inside the dorm there was a large lobby and a spiral staircase. A boy wearing a butter-yellow polo shirt was moving a mini fridge up the stairs. Penelope thought about the man in the rumpled linen suit. It was possible he lived in her dorm—but she doubted it.

  After Penelope’s mother arrived, they lugged all of Penelope’s possessions up to the third floor and opened the door. The room was composed of a large common room with a bedroom on either side (a single and a double). There was also a small white bathroom next to the single, which was good because Penelope’s mother was petrified of coed bathrooms. Penelope assumed she was in the double, since the single seemed to be taken already.

  Penelope examined her room, which was shared with a woman who had a predilection for aggressive neatness. Her bedspread was white. Above her bed, she had a poster of Madeleine Albright wagging her finger beneficently. Penelope didn’t even know they made posters of Madeleine Albright. “Bully for her,” Penelope intoned softly so her mother couldn’t hear.

  After contemplating things of a minute, while her mother put together a shelf in the common room, Penelope decided to make her bed. She put up her posters, which mainly consisted of one five-foot-wide panorama of Diego Luna doing a split on the set of Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights—Penelope had decided the poster would be an excellent conversation topic, because that is a movie everyone likes. She then put her desk lamp on the desk. She felt done.

  “I really feel ready,” she announced to her mother, who was holding a screwdriver between her teeth.

  “Good,” said her mother.

  “I think we are all done.”

  “Put your toiletries in the bathroom,” said her mother, pointing in that direction.

  Penelope sighed. She went back to her room and got her pink shower caddy, which contained shampoo, two hair dryers, and four razors, all in various phases of oxidation. Her roommates had left barely any trace of themselves in the bathroom, each decorously displaying only one clean razor and no shower caddy, as if already demonstrating their superior hygiene and sophistication. Then she opened the medicine cabinet. It was filled with tiny bottles of pills, most of which were Valium.

  Penelope closed the medicine cabinet and went back into the common room.

  “Well,” said her mother, “the shelf is done.”

  “Awesome,” said Penelope. The shelf seemed to be missing one leg. Penelope put a book on it.

  “Have you unpacked everything?”

  “Yup,” said Penelope.

  “Well, then I guess I better be getting back,” said Penelope’s mother, bursting into tears.

  “Oh, Mom … Don’t be sad.” Then Penelope started crying too.

  “You are going to have the best time here. Finally you are going to have friends, and maybe even a boyfriend.”

  “I don’t want to yearn after impossibilities,” said Penelope, hiccoughing.

  “OK,” said Penelope’s mother.

  “I am gonna miss you though.”

  “We are gonna miss you so much too. Call me as soon as your roommates show up. I think you might really like that Lan girl.”

  Penelope walked her mother downstairs and watched her get in the car and drive away. This was it. She was on her own.

  Many people have said that you can learn from history, or that history repeats itself, but Penelope did not agree with either of those droll sentiments, at least in application to her social life. Because sometimes his
tory has new eras of unprecedented behavior, and that is what Penelope was hoping to happen to her at college

  It was now four o’clock. All she had to do was wait for her roommates to come back so they could all skip laughingly to dinner.

  Penelope’s roommates still weren’t back yet. It was now nine p.m. She had been lying on the floor of the common room watching the only available channel on the TV for three hours. Luckily she found a rerun of the day’s Oprah in which Oprah interrogated teen prostitutes. It was pretty hard-hitting.

  “But why did you turn to sex to make money?” Oprah was asking a sixteen-year-old blond girl who seemingly had no idea why she didn’t become a bank teller.

  Enough of this! thought Penelope. In her exceedingly detailed fantasies about college, this is not how she thought the first night was going to progress. She got up and decided to investigate.

  The dorm looked menacing when empty, kind of like a manor house where a vicious housekeeper might convince you to throw yourself down the stairs. Penelope shivered and crept down the hall. As she neared the second floor, she heard voices coming from a small room directly below her own. The door was ajar. She knocked. Someone yelled, “Who’s there?”

  “It’s me, Penelope. I live upstairs?” She pushed open the door. Inside the room, which was much like her own, there were four boys, two sitting on a blue corduroy futon and two sitting on the floor. The two on the futon were looking at their laptops. The two on the floor were sharing a beer. They all stared at her in a pointed but uninterested way. Then they went back to their activities.

  “Nikil,” said a boy sitting on the futon, who was wearing a pair of thin rectangular glasses, to the other boy on the futon who was not wearing glasses, “do you know Sheila Bronstein?”

  “That name sounds really familiar,” said the one that was presumably Nikil. “Did she go to Stuy?”

  “No, Science,” said Glasses.

  “Those girls were all so busted,” said Nikil. “But it’s weird. I feel like I know her. It sounds so familiar.”