The woman sat down next to me at the round banquet table, tucking her skirt under her and placing her punch glass on the table as she sat. She wore her dyed-blond hair gathered up at the base of her neck. Round dark earrings glinted in her ears. She wore a dressy white blouse, nice without calling attention to itself. Her lipsticked mouth looked a little hard, till she smiled.
“I’m Rose,” I told her.
“I’m Harmony,” she said, and held out her hand.
She settled herself at the table. It was the opening night of the National Undergraduate Literature conference at Weber State in Utah, a banquet featuring readings by a one-time Poet Laureate. Harmony didn’t see nervous though. She sipped from her punch, surveyed the room, listened to the conversation of the three girls sitting across the table. She listened.
Harmony’s in her thirties, older than most of the students in the room, though certainly not the oldest. She started her undergraduate degree ten years ago in Madison, Wisconsin, but the campus was too big and she became a number there, not a student. She left college and got married instead. Now she has three kids. Her face changes when she talks about them, a smile lingering at the corners of her mouth as she lists their ages and names. The smile stays when she mentions her husband.
She is a fiction writer. She plans to be a professor. She already has the confidence, the poise. She still has another year to go before she graduates, she says, but she’s already started looking into grad school. She wants a school where she can get both her Masters and her PhD. She doesn’t want to move the family more than she has to.
“They’ll go with you, wherever you get in?” I ask.
Her husband will relocate to wherever she needs to go, she says. The kids haven’t quite put it together. “They know I’m looking at different schools, and they know these schools in different states. Right now, though, I commute to school from home. I don’t think they’ve realized I won’t be able to do that if school is across the country.”
A long-term program, then, it had better be.
good capture of the person in a short scene
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