Madison, the smiling hotel front-desk staffer at the Sheraton Philadelphia University City upgraded us to a “club level” room when we checked in on Sunday, possibly because of the peevish frown on my daughter’s face when she realized we’d be sharing a bed and didn’t have a pair of queens. The window of our upgraded room looks north toward Drexel University, not south toward the ivy-covered academic-gothic halls of the University of Pennsylvania’s Locust Walk. The skies of Philadelphia are gray and heavy with humidity. AccuWeather says the “Real Feel” will be 97 degrees this afternoon.
Nettie is a transfer student now at Penn, having started her new life on Monday. We were meant to arrive in the morning, chipper as fresh-scrubbed eager beavers (teeth shining as we beamed with smiles) for a 9 a.m. move-in slot but — despite my overdoing it, as usual, with my mom-ly organizing of the invasion via Honda CR-V, with overzealous hyperattention to all the schedules, requirements, tricks, and paperwork rained down upon the head of a mother delivering a student to college — the Rattrays sadly flunked our first challenge of orientation week: parking. It transpires that they don’t greet transfer students with festive balloon arches, Quaker standee photo props, or cheering crowds of volunteers throwing confetti and singing “The Red and Blue” as members of the crew and baseball team whisk your boxes and bags up to your new dormitory home for you. Nettie’s first morning was something of a shambles.
We got the car, packed to the roof with all the things a 19-year-old imagines she might need, out of the Sheraton parking garage in good order and made our way in a slow parade to the parking zone on Spruce Street that we’d been advised to approach, but were turned away by confused university police officers — because Nettie was headed to an upperclassmen’s dorm and not the freshman Quad. The streets were in gridlock; we took a slow-mo tour of the university’s many hospital buildings and medical-school facilities in the surrounding neighborhood as we tried to approach her dorm from the rear. We inched along, circling the campus, arguing and sweating bullets, for a full hour, being waved away from all the dedicated parking zones, before we finally overcame the resistance of a young man in the sky-blue T-shirt worn by orientation facilitators and convinced him to radio his supervisor for permission to park on 40th Street off Walnut.
(I’m going to have to investigate why Philadelphia has tree names for its streets: Chestnut, Walnut, Spruce, Filbert, Vine, Appletree, Pine. It creates a mood of pleasant expectation, even in gridlock. Reminders of the founding fathers are everywhere on the streets of Philadelphia this summer, down to the red, white, and blue bunting strung — somewhat incongruously? — above Cherry Street in Chinatown in celebration of the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence.)
The unsmiling matron in charge of the tent where they let you sign out delivery carts warned us that we had the use of a cart for exactly one hour and one hour only and if we didn’t return it on time (11:38), we would be fined $450! We were positively soaked with sweat as we pushed the delivery cart up and down Locust Walk as fast as we could in the heavy air. It was like a challenge from the reality television series “The Amazing Race,” in which a mother-and-daughter team has to move a half-ton of boxes, lamps, framed posters, color-coordinated cream-and-blue bedding, and bulging bags of bulky shoes at high speed from a distant parking spot, through the gauntlet of a crowded dorm lobby, and up in the elevator — making a pit stop in the basement mailroom — without murdering one another. There were a few cross words, but we came out of it okay. Nettie did get angry when my forehead sweat got onto her pristinely clean bed pillows and I did get angry when she went limp and stopped holding the leg of her headboard straight as I attempted to fasten it with zip ties to her bed frame.
Nettie’s skyscraper dorm goes all the way up to 24 floors, but her room is only on the sixth. Her view from the back of the building skims the chimneys of the Zeta Beta Tau frat house. The high-rise dorm was still mostly empty as of Tuesday morning; the rest of the upperclassmen return at the end of the week, and she’s met no one on her floor yet. She spent a lonely night in her adorably decorated, cozy little single room, which is in a four-person, three-bedroom suite with a kitchenette and accent walls painted quite confusing colors of tangerine, spearmint-gum green, and margarine yellow. The building was constructed in the 1970s and this fact is very evident in the popcorn ceilings and decrepit elevators.
There’s a certain charm to a 1970s high rise, however, we think. Is it retro? We were intrigued to encounter a trash chute in the recycling room down the hall, although it was stopped up with fragrant old garbage that some previous student resident, now departed, had jammed into it at some earlier date.
It is Tuesday and Nettie is getting excited now for transfer student orientation to begin in earnest at 1 p.m. with a mandatory info session in College Hall. She figured out how to turn the air-conditioning up to 11 and we are chilling ourselves a half-hour before heading back out into the swampy air over Locust Walk, where we will say our goodbyes but — I’m guessing — she may decline to hug her mother, under the imagined observation of her peers.
“I’m sadddd,” Nettie texts from the other room, adding extra D’s for emphasis.
“Why are you saddd?” I text back.
“Because I’m a bit lonely and it’s hard to start again,” she writes back.
The balloons, school cheers, and Quaker mascot will make their appearance for her this afternoon, I anticipate. The floor-to-ceiling windows here in the kitchenette of a sixth-floor suite in the high rise are filled mostly with sky now, which, as I write this is, is clearing and showing a bit of pale blue.