Life wasn’t exactly what she expected. The real East Coast people, like her roommates at Barnard from whom she first learned that bourgeois was a bad word, were WASP natives with beach houses, and they formed an impenetrable tribe that would never let her in long enough to belong. On weekends, she’d be their special guest star, the Midwestern charity case who was offered a peek at their peculiar rituals involving boat shoes, gingham napkins and thank-you notes, but she’d read enough Wharton to know that she would be a fool to try to parrot their ways. She learned the meaning of “shabby genteel” when she made her first Boston friends. They sleepwalked through life with passed-down manners borne of creaky Nantucket estates long since carved up, fought over, and lost. The Iowan in Mary-Sue felt that their frayed aristocratic style was vastly overprized, especially when it showed itself in their inability to locate the post office or, more pointedly, to pay for their share of a meal. The smart Jews were the ones she most longed to run with, but even the ones she bedded made her the brunt of quips about rednecks and anti-Semites. Most of these New York smart alecks had never been out of the five boroughs, let alone west of the Mississippi, yet they talked as if they knew everyplace and everything—a quality she once admired but quickly found repellent. She also had another disadvantage—she couldn’t stand jazz.

With school not providing the social nourishment she craved, she dropped out in her junior year and bounced up and down the Eastern seaboard, trying to find a perch to call home. After a few years, she headed west. Her third month working at a desolate used book store in Grass Valley, she met Chad, a prairie-voiced drifter from Omaha who caught her eye when he spent two hours picking his way through a copy of the I Ching. He seemed soothingly familiar to her—loose-limbed swagger, corn-fed grin; she wanted to scoop him home right away and make him pot roast or read his palms. But he had ideas of his own. He and his friends were starting up a commune on the coast north of San Francisco and needed one more person to make the rent. He told her, somewhat sheepishly, that the other six were also exiles from the Midwest. She jumped at it.