The Third Kim

One of the college stories I most enjoy telling people is the time that I was tried by my college’s judicial board for voodoo. The problem is, it wasn’t really for voodoo, and it wasn’t just me. And the image that most sticks with me from that day is my philosophy professor--the same one who taught me about Kant and Descartes and Nietszche--intently looking up the skirt of a Barbie doll while a group of nuns, faculty, and other students looked on.

I went to an all-women’s Catholic college that, like my girls’ Catholic high school, went co-ed right around the time I left. When I was there, nuns lived in the first floor of our dorm, right below us. They had their own TV room from which one of my friends once purloined a box of chocolates and a TV Guide. Boys were not allowed up in the rooms except for about two hours a day and had to be signed in and out.

The atmosphere did not seem that oppressive to me, mostly because I had heard horror stories from friends at other colleges about their roommates' constantly stoned boyfriends spending the night and taking food from the fridge and just generally smelling up the place. I never had to step over drunk people or clean up vomit or sleep in the lounge while a roommate hosted her boyfriend in the room, and since for most of college I didn’t have a serious boyfriend anyhow, I really had no need to host anyone, either.

Mostly the single girls in my dorm competed for the same half dozen decent-looking guys at a nearby college known for its flight program and for alcoholism. It should tell you something that the one boy I really liked from that school was from Manhattan and really wanted to go to art school, but his father wanted him to be a pilot. He left after one semester. The college, like ours, was small, so the six passable young men were valuable commodities and the subject of many rifts and arguments among my group of friends.

This is how we met Kim, who was a commuter and lived in an apartment downtown with her grandmother. She came with us to parties at the boys’ college, and she became especially close to a couple of my friends—I can’t say I ever knew her well. However, she was hard to forget. Even though big hair and stage makeup were the rage at the time (see my own photo), Kim had bigger hair and wore more makeup than anyone else we knew: blue and white eye shadow up to the brow, black liquid liner, frosty pink lipstick, pancake foundation. Although Kim hung out with us, she was often the topic of conversation, mostly because boys liked her, and also because of the makeup. It was rumored that she never took it off—that she slept in her makeup each night after spraying her entire face with Aqua Net—and then, upon waking, applied another layer right on top of it, as one might add new coats when painting a room. I, who could barely draw a straight line with pencil eyeliner, secretly admired her precision and discipline.

Somehow (and I don’t remember all the details) one of my friends found out that one of the boys she liked had made an overture to Kim, and the talk started to get vicious. She had had an abortion, it was rumored (and at a Catholic college, this was especially taboo). Worse, the abortion hadn’t “taken” and she’d been hospitalized. In retrospect, I’m sure that none of this was true, but it didn’t matter. We would meet in one of our rooms and share the latest Kim gossip, and the next day, she’d come over and visit and it was as if nothing had happened, nothing had been said—just sly glances exchanged when she would speak, or eye rolls behind her back.

One night someone had the idea that Kim should pay for what she had done (even though exactly what she had done remained, in truth, unclear.) We took a doll that a little girl had left in our lounge, and stuck pins in her and wrote horrible things about Kim on her legs and body. Then, giggling nervously, we left the doll outside of the room of the girl Kim had been visiting in our dorm.

We didn’t see her again until we sat at the table at the judicial board. Our sentence was twofold:  an official written apology and mandatory group counseling with a counselor who ended up trying to be our friend and sharing stories about her own college pranks. I remember a few words from the report: “We are concerned about the deterioration of your friendships” which even then I knew was wrong. This was not even about friendship—it was about enjoying being cruel to another person just because we could. And all around me at that table were sympathetic eyes who just wanted to give our fresh-faced, non-commuter selves another chance.