The Panty Raid (8 page)
Authors: Pamela Morsi
A
bright banner
was draped across the pond side entrance to Baldridge Hall. WELCOME ALUMNI CLASS OF 1956. As evening approached, men and women “of a certain age” made their way through the doors. In the dorm’s expansive living room two dozen round tables were decked out in school colors and surrounded by chairs. Along the entire wall space brightly decorated bulletin boards featured hundreds of collected photograph enlargements in black and white. They depicted a bygone era. A time of poodle skirts and bobby socks, when people liked Ike and nothing man-made had ever encountered outer space.
The visitors wandered through the photos, laughing, talking, remembering. One couple stopped directly in front of a flash-lit shot of Theta Pond. A group of denim-clad marauders carried ladders and were getting last minute instruction from a tall, well-muscled young man in a tight tee-shirt. The woman pointed to his picture and squeezed her husband’s arm.
“I don’t remember ever seeing this one,” she said. “This is the night we met.”
Beside her, he grinned. “I’d had my eye on you for a while,” he told her. “I had no idea you were about to literally dash cold water on my hopes.”
Another couple came up beside them. “Look Buzz, it’s the panty raid night,” the woman said. “Oh my God, Dot!”
“Trixie?”
The two women laughed and hugged delightedly. Beyond them, the two men exchanged a handshake.
“Hank, how you doing?”
“Buzz, it’s been forever. Is it Mr. Swartz or Dr. Swartz?”
“Dr.,” he answered. “Though I’m mostly retired. My daughter’s taken over the clinic. She lets me help out one day a week. I tell everybody I still practice medicine, because I’ve always needed lots of practice.”
Hank chuckled before turning to the spouse. “Trixie, you look fabulous,” he said, offering a polite kiss on the cheek.
“Thank you,” she replied. “You look pretty good yourself. How’d you manage to keep all that gorgeous hair? Could you give your secret to Buzz?”
“Mine didn’t fall out,” Buzz assured them. “Living with Trixie has had me pulling it by the roots.”
They all laughed together.
“I hoped you two would be here,” Trixie said. “I hate it that we lost track of each other.”
“Me too,” Dot said. “After graduation, we all just scattered and the next time I looked up, I didn’t know where anyone was.”
“It’s just how things are,” Trixie said. “You get started on life and work and kids and your only contact with people from college is the occasional Christmas card.”
“I didn’t even manage that,” Dot said.
“Me neither,” Trixie admitted. “We had three kids before Buzz even finished his residency. A weekly phone call with my mother was my total contact with the outside world.”
“But you loved it.” Dot’s words were not a question. She knew that much about her long ago roommate.
They continued wandering through the photographs, sharing memories and getting up to date. Buzz and Trixie had some information of mutual friends and they were holding out hope that several other couples they knew would show up. After an unpleasant divorce, Maylene had used her degree to open a booking agency for emerging artists. Eva married a local dairy farmer and had run a successful Organic Milk Cooperative.
“Even Trixie ended up working,” Buzz pointed out. “After the kids were all in school, she went into teaching.”
She nodded. “Loved it. Hated it. Loved it more. I still substitute whenever they call me.”
The women took seats at a nearby table and the guys fetched drinks from the bar. The room was beginning to fill up. Over the chattering of voices the sound of Fats Domino singing
My Blue He
a
ven
set the mood.
“I’m so glad you found teaching and that you enjoy it.”
“I do,” she admitted. “But these days I think grandparenting agrees with me more. I have five little ones.”
“Not so little anymore,” Buzz corrected, as he set down glasses and took a seat. “The oldest starts college next fall.”
Dot nodded. “It all goes fast.”
Everyone agreed.
“It seems like just a few years ago that we were all here,” Trixie said. “Now our grandson will be studying.”
“What about you two?” Buzz asked. “Do you have kids?”
“We have nine,” Dot answered.
Trixie was so shocked she nearly spit out her drink.
They laughed.
“Yeah, and we’ve seriously got you beat on the grandkid thing,” Hank added. “Twenty-two and counting.
“Oh my God!”
“It’s not quite as crazy as it sounds,” Dot said. “We only had two of ours biologically, the other seven, well, there’s a world of children who need parents and when they show up at your door, you take them in.”
“That is so amazing,” Trixie said. “You became Earth Mother and you were so keen on being the career woman.”
“Oh she was definitely a career woman, still is.”
“So you did it all!” Trixie said.
“I wouldn’t say I did it all,” Dot corrected. “More like I did some of all of it.”
“So, spill the beans. The last I heard you two were off to graduate school.”
“Hank got his engineering degree,” Dot said. “I tried, too. But I couldn’t get admission. They did let me audit some classes and I got very interested in hydrology and water management.”
“Which turned out to be perfect,” Hank said. “After I graduated we joined Peace Corps.
“The Peace Corps,” Trixie repeated.
“We were in one of the first teams assigned in Southeast Asia,” Hank told him. “We arrived in Thailand January 1962.”
“Wow, that must have been an adventure,” Buzz said.
“It was,” Dot agreed. “A really fabulous adventure.”
Hank nodded. “And it was a terrific opportunity,” he said. “The Peace Corps was desperate for qualified scientific and technical volunteers and they offered a lot of opportunities for women. When they saw Dot’s interest and qualifications, they snapped her up to do local water resources testing and purification.”
“And when they found out I was married to a civil engineer, well, they gave him plenty to do as well.”
“After we completed our commitment,” Hank said, “we formed our own company and spent the next thirty years doing similar jobs for non-profits all through the third world.”
“So we’ve lived a lot of places,” Dot said. “But it’s very exciting to be back here at State where everything started for us.”
“I always tell people that Buzz and I would never have found each other if you hadn’t traded places with me at the panty raiders’ cotillion.”
Dot shook her head. “That’s not how I remember it,” she said. “You were already in line to be with him. And we traded places. It was Hank cutting in that sealed your fate.”
“Well, however the two of you managed it, Trixie and I are grateful.”
Dot smiled. “We feel the same way. We came here to learn something and we managed to get a good education and a start in life.”
“And we had a lot of fun doing it,” Buzz piped in.
Through the cocktail hour and the dinner, more people stopped by, more stories were re-told or caught up. It was a time full of laughter and barely eaten chicken.
As dessert was served the program commenced with brief remarks from Class President Henry Langley. And then a very, very long discourse from former graduate Mary Jane Coulter, a twenty-year veteran of the state legislature. Unfortunately, in Mary Jane’s off-the-cuff nostalgia for how things used to be, she began complaining about “young people today”.
Hank shot a quick glance to catch his wife rolling her eyes.
Immediately, he stood and pushed back her chair. “Excuse us a minute,” he whispered generally to the table before leading Dot out the nearby French doors and onto the coolness of the long porch.
He barely had them out of hearing distance when she huffed in disgust. “That stuff makes me
so
crazy,” she said.
“I know.”
“It’s exactly the kind of mindset that we came up against.”
“I know.”
“Young people today have challenges just as formidable as our own.”
“I know.”
“What is it with aging humans that we get stuck in our own experience and disrespect those who haven’t lived as we lived!”
“I don’t know.”
After a long moment of clenched jaw and tight fists, Dot finally shook her head and sighed before turning to him wryly. “You didn’t have to rescue me,” she said. “I wasn’t going to start heckling.”
Hank shrugged. “I wasn’t worried about her, she could use some heckling. You know, Mary Jane was our mole inside on the panty raid night. Totally a traitor to her gender.”
“So you brought me out here because…?”
“Because I have great memories of this porch,” he said. He turned to gesture toward the garden steps. “I recall some very serious snogging with you here.”
Dot smiled. “Yeah, right before you told me that you didn’t want to marry me.”
“I think there was some stuff in-between those two things,” he said. “But it was true. I did not want to marry just a part of Dorothy Wilbur. I wanted the whole woman beside me.”
“And how did that work out for you?” she asked teasing.
Hank grinned, but his words were serious. “I got to be a whole man.”
T
erritory
Trysts
Wild Oats
Runabout
T
ales from Marrying Stone
Marrying Stone
Simple Jess
The Lovesick Cure
A Marrying Stone Christmas (coming soon)
S
mall-Town Swains
Something Shady
No Ordinary Princess
Sealed With a Kiss
Garters
The Love Charm
W
omen’s Fiction
Doing Good/Social Climber of Davenport Heights
Letting Go
Suburban Renewal
By Summer’s End
The Cotton Queen
Bitsy’s Bait & BBQ
Last Dance at Jitterbug Lounge
Red’s Hot Honky-Tonk Bar
C
ontemporary Romance
The Bikini Car Wash
The Bentley’s Buy at Buick
Love Overdue
Mr. Right Goes Wrong
S
ingle Title Historicals
Heaven Sent
Courting Miss Hattie
Sweetwood Bride
Here Comes the Bride
N
ovellas
With Marriage In Mind in the collection
Matters of the Heart
The Pantry Raid in the collection
The Night We Met
Daffodils In Spring in the collection
More Than Words: Where Dreams Begin
Making Hay
N
ational bestseller
and two-time RITA Award winner, Pamela Morsi was duly warned. “Lots of people mistakenly think they are writers,” her mother told her. She’d be smart to give it up before she embarrassed herself. Fortunately, she rarely took her mother’s advice. With 30 published titles and millions of copies in print, she loves to hear from readers.
