Twenty After Six

… and so, they’d sit around in the late afternoon — fading light filtering through the dusty glass of the basement window in the fraternity house bar, kids from all over, boys and girls from Iowa or California or Massachusetts or Georgia, the girls up for the weekend from Smith or Wellesley or Green Mountain College, drinking beer and laughing, lucky, oblivious, charmed American college students. And then, as suddenly as all had assembled there, it would be only he and Sally and Packer — all the others mysteriously and unaccountably disappeared.  “Where did everybody go?” he’d ask Packer. “We were all having such a great time and now they’re gone!”  Packer would look at him incredulously. “You don’t get it do you?” he’d say. “They’ve taken the girls back to the “Blue Spruce Inn” to change and now they’re upstairs shaving and showering and getting dressed to go the Hanover Inn for dinner. “But we were all having such a good time.  Why the hell would anyone leave this?” he’d protest. Packer, who went to prep school in up-state New York and understood such things, was losing his patience. “You dope,” he shrugged, “they’re all practicing to be adults!” And then one or the other of them would absent-mindedly glance at the Budweiser clock behind the bar and it would invariably be twenty minutes after six.