Design on a Dime, 1969 (Revised for anthology)

Orange flounces and more orange flounces. Not burnt sienna or tawny suede, but basic orange as found in a Crayola box of five. It was a vision of attention getting boldness. I loved it. My mother hated it. She was an Eve Picone suited woman. Lace, ruffles and especially flounces were time wasters. Orange burlap irritated her sophisticated senses.

“But the orange flounced curtains match the orange flouncing on the skirt around the row of sinks. Matches the closet door covering, too,” I whined.

“I haven’t paid my good hard earned money for you to live in a basement. You’ll catch your death of rheumatism down here,” she countered.

“You don't get it, Mom. Leslie, Diana, Julia and I want to live here in Rood House. It’s the senior dorm. This suite was the last space available.”

“A suite! Is that what you call this dungeon? Your room has two window slits at the ceiling; your study area is the former laundry and the bathroom doesn’t have a proper tub.”

Once she got started, my mother was a steamroller. “Did you see the large windows in Diana and Julia’s room?” I parried.

“So what, I’m not their mother. Windows? Hmmmm, I did notice the door. That’s it, that’s why your so-called “friends” talked you into living in this cave. A nice back door so boys can come and go as they please. Well, I won’t have it. You are not living in a pit without proper supervision for what this is costing me. Dean Jean is going to get a piece of my mind, right now!”

I prayed that the Dean of Women, exhausted by parents’ visiting day activities, was already back in her own home, sipping Darjeeling from a Havilland teacup.

Cornell College in Mt. Vernon, Iowa was Brigadoon for my mother. She had earned her BA in night school while waitressing at my grandmother’s restaurant. Her only child, me, would have the ultimate coed experience she had wanted. We had toured many campuses before reaching the hamlet of Mt.Vernon. It was love at first sight as we drove around a curve and beheld the better than picture-postcard scene of King Chapel crowning the hill with ivy-covered halls of learning spread out below. At that moment, no matter what courses of study were available or how much it cost, Mom decided that her daughter would attend this college. Since Cornell had been selected for its beauty, it was more than ironic that I would spend my senior year in a musty cellar. My mother’s dreams were tarnished by orange flounces.

There was more to my choice than rooming with other seniors or my first opportunity to interior decorate. It was 1969, the time of flower-power and counter-culture. That year a peace rally replaced the homecoming parade. Kent State would occur that spring. One of the few chances I had to demonstrate my newly liberal self was to live in a basement. Besides, Rood House had history and character. Cornell, founded in 1853, was the initial college west of the Mississippi to grant women the same privileges as men. The first women to graduate college in Iowa had lived in one of the three boarding houses that were later joined together to become our senior residence.

Along with its women’s rights association, our “garden apartment” offered various benefits. The space shared by Leslie and I was so small that we had trundle beds. Leslie’s mattress was soft and lumpy, and mine, set perpendicular to hers, was hard and unforgiving. During the day, if we made our beds, one tucked neatly under the other, creating a lavish couch with mustard yellow pillows that coordinated beautifully with the orange flounces. Pulled out for sleeping, my Simmons Beautyrest fought with Leslie’s dresser for space. The result was an effective alarm clock. Spray deodorant had just become popular, so Leslie could leave a cloud of Secret to guarantee I would wake-up coughing. I built a bedside table with a triangle scrap of wood perched on a cement block. To contrast pleasingly with the room’s already rich color palette, I painted it olive green. This accent furniture taught physics. A glass of water, or a can of beer, or a paper cup of wine could never maintain its balance on the tri-cornered board.

Everything was perpetually cold and damp (despite the dehumidifier my mother insisted on buying). The bathroom was the worst. It was a blessing that we did not have a proper tub because we would have fainted from the rotten fish odors before we finished washing our toes. In the mornings, none of us shouted to be first in the bathroom, not because Dean Jean had taught us better manners, but because Diana’s cat spent the night there. Angel was no such thing as he hissed and charged the unfortunate victim who gave in to the call of nature. It wasn’t until April that Julia noticed the radiator bolted to the bathroom ceiling. We all bemoaned our needlessly icy winter. In truth, I had seen this heat-maker in September but didn’t mention it to my friends. I thought it was worth the chilly visits, if only Angel would freeze to death one night.

If you can picture the Twiggy era fashions, orange was very popular. The decision to anchor my scheme with the color of sherbet push-ups had two causes. The first was that orange is Cornell’s unofficial school color. The Orange Carpet was the focal point of the Student Union when it opened in 1966. Referred to as the "OC"it remains the place to be and to be seen. The second, and more significant reason was the sale price of thirty yards of flaming sunset tinted burlap. We established that anything orange would add to the décor. I bought an orange radio and an orange paisley wastebasket. Illinois orange license plates made great wall art because we overlooked the spatterings of black spots. Jack-o-lanterns provided silly grins before, during and long after Halloween. Stolen from food service, a case of oranges highlighted a dark corner even after their citrus scent turned sour. Every Hallmark Store from Cedar Rapids to Iowa City contributed mandarin colored candles. We became Syracuse, Oklahoma State, and Clemson fans and natives of Orange County California. We drank as much Tang as we did beer. If it wasn’t orange, we made it orange. Our teddy bear collections profited from orange accessories. We put family photos, calendars and pictures of Elvis Pressley in orange frames.

My carefully decorated dorm room was more than a forerunner of HGTV’s Design on a Dime. Remarkable events, during that all too turbulent school year, occurred within its garishly illuminated walls. Great philosophical debates and pecking out term papers on manual typewriters took place in the study room. Guys did come and go as we pleased through Diana and Julia’s convenient outside door. However, the real living happened in my orange, mustard and olive room. Diana was standing next to the bug-covered license plates when the mail girl delivered her acceptance to the doctoral program at the University of Chicago. Leslie planned the details of our anti-war sit-in while slouched on her lumpy bed. In front of an audience of stuffed animals with orange bows, I giggled self-conciously each time I practiced the creative writing I had to recite for part of my senior thesis. My first look at Diana’s real engagement ring and Leslie’s fake engagement ring was in the glow of the lamp with the orange shade. After days of staring at weeds through our window slits, I decided to go to graduate school at the University of Illinois, because my ex-boyfriend was there although I knew he would break my heart again. Julia trembled, hunched-over on our orange shag, when she revealed that her student-teaching advisor had sexually intimidated her.

The starkest image is the four of us huddled around my disturbingly cheerful radio. The numbers being announced sounded like drum beats. In 1969, the military began a lottery system ending draft deferments for college students. The randomly assigned numbers of the guys we knew and loved were tattooed on our hearts. As the earliest numbers were called, shrieks could be heard from every corner of Rood House. Those chosen first in the lottery were about to get one-way tickets to Viet Nam. Thankfully, I can usually block that memory by recalling the sweetness of orange birthday cakes, the fizz of Sunkist soda pop, the jolt of license plates falling off the wall, the crash of Diana’s cat breaking my orange vase, the stickiness of orange juice saturating the shag rug, or the dilemma of wearing a flower power blouse or a Clemson sweatshirt.

My mother’s criticism of orange flounces was prophetic. I do have rheumatism. I have never since lived below ground level. In home decorating and attire, I avoid any colors that even resemble orange. As far as I know, Leslie, Julia and Diana no longer consider buggy license plates acceptable wall art.

Actually, when deriding our basement situation, my mother coined our nickname. We were then and are still known today as the infamous residents of “The Pit.” The next year, Cornell replaced Rood House with a science building, denying future students the pleasures of subterranean living. However, in the most important way, my mother was wrong about “The Pit.” Living there was worth every penny she paid for it.