My empty room is emptier than yours, said the masked man as he rode off into the night. And you knew he was right, so you hitched a ride on the Penn-Central, so you hitched your wagon to a star, so you hitched up your jeans and waited for godot. Empty rooms are relative, so you slid up and down the legs of the glass table looking for the cake that said Eat Me, and waited for your prince to come. So you scribbled your initials in the dust beneath the table, so you scribbled his initials in the steamiest on the mirror, so you scribbled your initials with his last name appended on someone's dirty window, and it rained. And at college you learned that, if you go far enough, all roads lead to hell.

I

IN WHICH the spelling bee stings a mole (of electrons) and the girl in the grey flannel suit hears from Radcliffe.

"What kind of a student is Radcliffe looking for? An obvious question with a not-so-obvious answer," explains Introducing Radcliffe. They were not, for example, looking for the girl in the grey flannel suit. They were, apparently, looking for you and me and the girl down the hall, the one who runs a vacuum cleaner every Sunday morning at 6 a. m. In high school the corridors smell of chalk dust, and lunch costs 45c with milk, and who the hell are they looking for? I, you see, knew all the Presidents once, but Margie knew all the Presidents and could run the track faster than anyone else. And you, I understand, knew the atomic numbers of every single element on that little chart. Did the 75 in typing ruin your average? No matter. They were looking for us. And they never-how many times did they tell us?-they never make a mistake.

"Radcliffe Admissions officers are looking for different kinds of young women.... Radcliffe needs all kinds of people." What did the girl in the grey flannel suit imagine in high school? When you read the pamphlet, what did you see? A violinist, a Merit Scholar or two, a Shakespeare expert? A poet, a biochemist, an aristocrat? Cultured young women, taking tea with the Galbraiths? Hornrimmed girls in dirty trenchcoats dotting the steps of Widener Library? The chocolate, peach and lime the CRIMSON warned of? Or Playboy's poll: "Cliffies are Merit Scholars who are good in bed" (thank God! the best of both worlds!). How could we know, when we packed our suitcases, packed those Villager skirts and shoes with matching pockerbooks, packed little dresses for the teas and sweat-shirts and jeans, how could we know that we were absolutely right, and absolutely wrong, about everything.

How could we know that the violinist would sit in the room next door and cry, as rug, walls and violin gathered dust? How could we know that the Merit Scholar would run up and down the hallways for exercise, shouting the lyrics to "Rockabye Baby"? How could we know that the Shakespeare expert would sneak around the dorm at night stealing food from everybody's rooms? That the poet, our roommate, would never get out of bed? That the biochemist, three doors down, never slept? That the aristocrat would run away, leaving behind only her collection of bottlecaps? How could we Know?

Certainly we were never told.

"... I wish to show at the outset why you cannot go into the kitchen and make soup and count that soup for a degree. This is not because Radcliffe College belittles soup-making, or your soup-making in particular, but because the Radcliffe degree is essentially the Harvard degree, and it is warranted by a committee of the Harvard Faculty, by the President and Corporation and the Officers of Harvard College."-LeBaron Russell Briggs, 1909, quoted in Introducing Radcliffe.

II

IN WHICH I move to Harvard and learn about soup.

The Harvard Faculty, President and Corporation, may never accept a bowl of homemade chicken noodle soup toward their B. A. degree, but they will accept almost anything else. And very little of it: the Harvard degree is essentially a piece of paper. The Radcliffe degree is essentially the Harvard degree.

This is not to denigrate the value of a Harvard degree. Nor, for that matter, the value of a bowl of soup. Both these commodities can come in very handy, comfort the dying, and get one through many a hard day to come. Both come in various flavors, strengths, and thicknesses. Both, any young Radcliffe woman will note are invaluable attributes in trapping a young Harvard man. (As Mrs. LeBaron Russell Briggs would no doubt agree). Both are best when hot; both can be burned.

Remaining points about soup:

1) It is quite possible that soup-making could in fact be used toward the Harvard degree, cloaked in the requisite verbiage. Dressed up as Independent Study, perhaps, with the signature of a sympathetic or guiltily liberal member of the English department, or as a Soc Rel research project in self-expression. Or perhaps soup as a study of differing structural systems; soup, thought and reality; soup and time-sense on the Fiji Islands; levels of expression through hot and cold soup. Uses of soup in American literature. How many cooks spoil the broth?-a narrative essay. The possibilities are endless, and therein lies the essence of Harvard.

2) Radcliffe soup is essentially Harvard soup.

3) Adams House serves a fine scotch broth, and a passable clam chowder. It was over a bowl of the latter that the young Radcliffe woman, fresh off the boat from the 'Cliffe (a small girls' college in Cambridge) met the young Harvard man, up for a day from the Yard (an esoteric prison camp, not to be confused with the expression "thirty feet long and a Yard wide," in which yard refers to a small green mammal). "Hello," he said, "do you live here?"

"Yes," she said.