Well sure Mel has a split personality. Who doesn’t? It’s not a problem unless it’s a problem.

She’s always been bright. Very cerebral.

And she’s always been fascinated with sex.

So she has two strains of relationships: the deviants and the nerds. They never meet.

There was freckled Betty, who she taught to masturbate at five. Catholic Nora and their fifth grade theology debates. Then Candy, always into sex, who practiced deep kissing on her when they were ten, who joined Mel at eleven in shallow caves behind the school for sessions of self-molestation, and who had to drop out of tenth grade, pregnant with the first of her five odd-fathered babies. Mel’s brilliant careful best-friend Ellen, discovered in high school, multi-laterally religious and scientific too, with whom she sought the answers to the ultimate metaphysical questions. Dark Michelle in college. Mary, ingenious and distracted, deep in ADD, Mel’s first attempt at a business partnership at thirty. Vee, just Vee, for overdrinking and overdrugging, for groups and gropes and the death knell to the Mary venture.

It’s Michelle she’s remembering now. Michelle and Moe. He affected Frenchness and asked everyone to call him Maurice, but his birth certificate read Morris Zimmerman. Mel was struck when they declared to her that oral sex was better than genital. Their statement blew her away. Mel was a virgin then.

She met them when she first came to college. But the retrospective is a better view.

The memories formed in Berkeley. The year was 1967 and the cast of characters assembled in September. Mel had selected her dormitory site unseen, solely for its proximity to Telegraph Avenue. She and Ellen had been parentally prohibited from sharing a room, owing to a recent (chaste) misadventure involving a bonfire and older boys at Stinson Beach. Mel had no roommate preference other than her best friend. So she picked the residential obelisk closest to all the action, and she took her chances with random assignment. She got Michelle.

There was no sign of her when Mel’s parents delivered their first-born to room 312. Michelle made her appearance soon after they left.

“Are you my new roomie?” Her voice piped like a child’s, lilting on “room.”

Mel turned away from organizing her underwear drawer, to first sight. She felt no love and little interest. She intended to get along with her roommate of course, but Michelle was no Ellen. She sounded and looked a lot like what Mel was trying to escape.

Michelle was cute. Short, small, with sleek brown hair longer than Mel’s, round chocolatey eyes, a pert nose, big breasts, tiny feet. Her lips weren’t full but the upper one curled poutily. Her fingers were short and her palms were plump.

“Where you from?” she continued after Mel smiled and nodded greeting at her. That voice! High, thin and sweet. Mel wondered if Michelle’s vocal chords were shorter than her own.

“Oh, I just crossed the Bay. You?”

“West Virginia.”

Mel was floored. She’d heard of West Virginia but she didn’t know precisely where it was. West of Virginia, obviously, and she knew Virginia was somewhere near Washington, but she didn’t know U.S. geography then. She’s learned it since, through Internet games, and she thinks West Virginia has the funniest shape of the fifty.

Coal mines. Mountains. What they call mountains in the East anyway. Mountains with their tops shaved off, for coal. That’s what Mel had heard about West Virginia. What she asks now is: why was Michelle coming all the way to Cal?

For that matter, Mel wonders now and wonders why she didn’t then about the homes of all the other students she met during orientation. Half of them were from LA (Grant High School or Uni), but all the rest were out-of-state. There were kids from Wisconsin, Oklahoma, Montana. A clot of them from Washington, D.C. But the group of young men who became her friends were from Delaware.

Delaware. The state that makes Maryland look big. The place with Chancery Court and a reverence for corporations. Traveling all the way to UC…