Hill Women

by Cassie Chambers

  Granny’s funeral was filled with music: bright, fast, mountain tunes that rang out of the chapel and echoed off the mountains. I noticed some people’s feet tapping as the musicians played and sang. I knew she would have been pleased. We buried her next to Papaw, on the top of a hill that looked over a beautiful holler.

  After Granny’s funeral, my mother told me what joy Granny had gotten from the tape I’d made for her before I went back to school. She listened to it daily, my mother said. One time, Granny’s breathing grew labored and she was in and out of consciousness. Her children gathered around her bed to say their goodbyes. My mother put on the tape so that I, far away on a mountain in New Mexico, could say goodbye in my own way. A few measures into the song, Granny arose from her apparent coma and began clapping her hands. “What’s everyone lookin’ so sad for?” she said as she began singing along. Everyone laughed.

  I know Granny is still singing and laughing in the mountains somewhere. Sometimes she sends us small signs. A few months after Granny’s death, my mother visited her grave. Overwhelmed with how much she missed Granny, my mother began to weep. Out of nowhere, a bird came diving down from the sky. Granny had always loved birds—she kept a pair of “love birds” in her trailer and put hummingbird feeders in her yard. When the bird flew in between my mother’s legs, she cried out and ran a few feet away from the grave. The bird followed. It continued to flit and flap around my mother’s head until both she and my father burst into laughter.

  * * *

  —

  Later that fall, I received my college acceptance letter. I had applied early decision to Wellesley College, an all-women’s school near Boston. I had known about Wellesley before I went to UWC—it was always near the top in the list of colleges that I pored over. But I think, in part, I had chosen Wellesley because a lot of my friends were applying there. The school had a strong relationship with UWC, so it felt like somewhere safe and known.

  But I also applied to Wellesley because I was afraid to apply anywhere else. I was still struggling with a need to be perfect, or at least to seem perfect. And that was hard to do when I compared myself to my UWC classmates. They spoke multiple languages, won national awards for mathematics, traveled to multiple continents. They were the ones who should go to Harvard, Yale, Princeton. I was not. I didn’t want to embarrass myself by trying, and inevitably failing, to compete with them. Despite being an excellent school, Wellesley had a higher acceptance rate than many schools of equal caliber, probably because of its naturally smaller applicant pool. It seemed like a good compromise: I could go to an incredibly well-respected school without risking failure.

  It was uncomfortable to look back on how far I had come from where I’d started. I felt lucky to be where I was. And I don’t mean lucky in the sense that I was merely appreciative of the opportunities before me. I knew—I still know—that there were many students in both Berea and Owsley County who were just as smart as me. My friend Matthew had regularly scored higher than me on tests. My friend Anne Marie outdid me in most subjects as well. My cousin Melissa was just as bright as me when we were children.

  I now had advantages that these friends and family members did not. I had a supportive school with a talented college-admissions counselor who had connections to the best universities in the country. Many of my Berea classmates had received little guidance in the application process. Some of them had decided not to bother applying at all, and made choices that would alter their lives forever. Melissa had dropped out of high school and eloped with her boyfriend on her eighteenth birthday. A few months later she announced she was pregnant. When Aunt Ruth begged her to finish high school, she said, “Why, Lord-a-mercy no! I’m a married woman now.”

  In light of all of this, I felt that my opportunities were precarious, that I was one bad step away from being right back where I’d started. It’s not that it was a bad place to be, Berea. It’s just that I—more so with each day—defined myself as someone who achieved. And for many years, I would believe that achieving meant staying outside of the community that had formed me.

  The post office was located at the bottom of the hill that UWC sat on. I opened my Wellesley acceptance letter as soon as I pulled it from the mailbox. I didn’t feel excited. Instead, I breathed a sigh of relief. I was going to college, to a good college. As I walked back up the hill toward campus, I thought about all of the ways I was headed up.

  Wellesley College looks like a postcard. Trees line the perimeter of the campus, making it feel separate, distinct from the surrounding community—a world unto itself. The brick and stone buildings possess a sort of European charm. There are hidden passages and unexpected balconies.

  During the first-year activities fair, I signed up for something approaching twenty different clubs. If I wasn’t sure what a club was, I still put my name down just in case I might be interested. I ran for class vice president, though no one knew me and I didn’t realize I needed to campaign. I lost the race handily.

  Electoral defeats aside, I still thought I had an advantage in this new environment: I had lived away from home for two years, and the extra year in New Mexico meant I was older than most entering students. Plus, I had ten or so UWC classmates joining me on campus. Even my roommate, a friendly Latvian who borrowed my socks without asking, was a UWC alumna. I set big goals for myself: I was going to do it all. Study hard, be social, be involved in my community.

  This felt achievable at Wellesley. People were welcoming, and it didn’t take much effort to get involved. I ended up joining far too many of those clubs I’d signed up for, including a modern dance class. I was the worst student in the group by far—I fell down at least twice per class—but everyone was supportive. “You did so much better today,” one upperclasswoman told me on a regular basis. It was code for “You weren’t as terribly-awfully-horrible today as you were last week,” but it always made me smile. Wellesley is a school founded on and designed around female empowerment. Most of the women I met took this value to heart.

  I had always been quiet in my classes at UWC. I was never confident that I had the right answer. Even if we were just telling anecdotes about our different cultural experiences, I was always sure someone had an experience more interesting than mine. After the 2004 election, UWC students were discussing the presidential outcome. I listened to their theories about why Americans had voted for George W. Bush over John Kerry, but I didn’t weigh in. Even though I was the only American in that room, I still felt that their opinions were more valid than mine.

  At Wellesley, I learned to speak up. The school was always talking about how this was a place for women to find their voices. I took that literally. It wasn’t comfortable to express an opinion in front of a hundred-person lecture hall—my hands would shake and my voice would crack—but it got slightly less terrifying each time I did it. At least twice I had older students come up to me after a class and tell me, “I really enjoyed what you had to say.”

  Of course there were pockets of exclusivity set apart from this backdrop of inclusion. In the spring of my first year, I tried to join one of the societies on campus. Ostensibly, these societies were founded to promote different causes: the arts, classics, politics. Yet many of them functioned like sororities, full of women from elite New England prep schools and California private academies. I think I wanted to join a society because it felt like they offered a piece of the college experience I was missing. They had parties. Sometimes they had parties with men. It all sounded very exciting. Plus, I wanted to prove to myself that I could belong there, with these women who seemed so sophisticated and worldly.

  Each of the societies hosted a series of teas as part of the selection process, basically “meet and greets” where the current members got to size up the prospective applicants. I showed up at my first tea in tight-fitting jeans with rhinestones and a baggy sweater. I immediately felt out of place. My jeans were a few shades too light, and my shirt
was made out of the wrong material. I didn’t have a headband or pearl earrings. My hair wasn’t straight enough or shiny enough. I was disappointed when I didn’t get in, but not terribly surprised.

  Thankfully, I had my fellow UWC grads to keep my spirits up. There were enough of us on campus that we remained an ad hoc family. We made cakes for one another’s birthdays and studied together at the Starbucks in town. We played the songs that had been popular at UWC, and looked through old photographs of ourselves in New Mexico. We stayed up too late and had one too many glasses of wine.

  I didn’t know any Wellesley students from Kentucky. I don’t think I knew any from Appalachia. I’m sure they were there, these other mountain transplants. But I didn’t miss their presence in the same way I had at UWC. I had learned to create other identities and communities. At that point, my roots in Eastern Kentucky were no longer the only thing grounding me.

  * * *

  —

  My first experience with the Ivy League came on a Friday night. There was a bus that would take women from Wellesley into Boston, and one of its stops was in Harvard Square. A few of my UWC classmates were attending Harvard, and we thought it would be fun to have a spontaneous reunion. We met at a restaurant to catch up on gossip about our new lives and former classmates.

  After dinner, one of my UWC classmates, a year ahead of me, invited us to come and hang out at his finals club. I didn’t know what a finals club was, but I soon discovered that Harvard has all-male exclusive social clubs—like fraternities but with a more monied, privileged ambience. We walked the few short blocks to the club and went in the basement entrance.

  There were a lot of men and a few women hanging out in the largely windowless room. My friends went to grab drinks, and I somehow found myself surrounded by unfamiliar Harvard men. “Wow, this is a nice place,” I told one of them. It wasn’t really—it looked like your typical college living room with an added sense of faded grandeur—but I was trying to make small talk. “What’s the rest of it like?” It was clear that we were in a very small part of a much larger house.

  “Like something you’re not going to see,” he responded. “Only members get to go upstairs. And certainly not women.” He looked at me as though he expected me to be impressed. I wasn’t sure how to react, so I quickly found a reason to leave the conversation.

  I went to parties at finals clubs several more times after that. In many ways, I hated the institutions. The way the all-male membership got to control access to these places of perceived power. The way the men selected the women to allow in at the door as though they were selecting sandwiches at a deli counter. The way some men would turn up their noses at me whenever I told them I went to Wellesley. “Are you planning to get your MRS degree?” one asked, bursting into laughter at his joke about marriage. In general, the men seemed to assume that I, and every other Wellesley woman, would fall all over them. They had, in their view, deigned to let us into their exclusive clubs. There was a pervasive sense that we should be grateful.

  And—as much as I hate to admit it—there were times when I did feel grateful. I felt like I had accomplished something when I was invited—I made sure to tell women from the societies that had rejected me that I had spent the previous evening at a finals club. At those parties, I was passing for privileged in one of the most privileged environments in the world. It turns out that my college-self was willing to put up with a decent amount of chauvinism for that feeling.

  * * *

  —

  Toward the end of my first year at Wellesley, I began to date a guy from an Ivy League school. His name was Diego, and he went to Princeton. He had been a year ahead of me at UWC. I hadn’t known him well at school; he was part of a cooler crowd than I was. I remember watching him at UWC as he meandered around campus with his rowdy and confident group of friends. I would look the other way when I saw them coming—I felt anxious when they were around, worried that they would ignore me. Or, even worse, that they wouldn’t and I’d have to figure out something cool to say.

  The day Diego got in to college, he walked into one of his final exams in swim trunks, carrying a boom box. He spent five minutes scribbling a few words on the paper, then walked out and headed to the pool. This exit, and Diego in general, became UWC legend. He was smart, handsome, and uninterested in taking orders from anyone.

  Diego and I reconnected at a party hosted by some UWC classmates, just a few weeks before summer. I was going to be in D.C. that summer for an internship, and he told me his family lived nearby. He said we’d be in touch. I almost hoped we wouldn’t—I still got nervous when he was around. He always looked at me with a wry smile and a slightly tilted head. I could never tell what he was thinking.

  But he set out to win me over that summer. He picked me up from my internship and took me to an expensive French café to eat madeleines for lunch. He told me not to worry when lunch ran long—after all, he said, “it’s just an internship.” He cooked me Mediterranean food in my apartment, and we had a picnic on the roof. When I returned to college, he gave me an expensive necklace for my birthday. He told me he loved me, and that our relationship was the most important thing in the world. He struck me as very old, very wise, and very mature.

  When Diego took me to New York, to a party with his Princeton friends at a fancy penthouse, he gave me instructions on how to behave. “Don’t be too loud,” he warned me. I heard the “they’ll find you irritating” at the end of that sentence, even though he didn’t say it. Once we were at the party he pointed to people in the room and recited the names of the companies where their fathers were CEOs. I didn’t know most of the companies, but I raised my eyebrows and pretended to be as impressed as he wanted me to be. This was his world. I was a guest in it at his invitation. As with the finals clubs, I was happy to be allowed in.

  But after a few months, I began noticing things about Diego that bothered me. If I went to Boston for a night without him, he would ask me if there’d been any men in the group I was with. If I said yes, he would interrogate me about the evening, lecture me about how it looked suspicious for me to spend time with other men. Once, a coed group of friends and I hung out in the living room of a male dorm, and Diego raged for an hour about the impropriety of it all. He threatened to break up with me because I entered a ballroom dance competition without telling him about it. Ballroom dancing was far too sexy an activity for his girlfriend to participate in.

  He suddenly didn’t like my friends. Although he’d been friends with some of them at the beginning, now he thought they were too promiscuous, too trashy, not a good influence. None of this was true, of course, but it was true to him. He once didn’t speak to me for an entire four-hour car ride because I told his cousin, who was in the car with us, a funny story about a friend of mine kissing someone at a debate tournament. “I thought you said she was a good person!” he screamed at me when I asked him why he was ignoring me. “She’s a slut and you lied to me.” His cousin gave me a sympathetic look as Diego resumed his silence.

  Diego found ways to make me feel inferior, and a favorite was the fact that I didn’t go to an Ivy League school. He let it be known that while Wellesley was acceptable, it was nowhere near the category of Princeton. He once told me he liked that I went to a school for women who were “smart but not too smart.”

  Still, he was funny, confident, sometimes sweet. After we fought he would buy me presents and tell me how wonderful I was. We went on adventures, like taking the Greyhound to D.C. for the weekend or riding the train to New York City for the evening. We once went to Newport, Rhode Island, and spent the day walking hand in hand along the beach, talking about our future together. My emotions regarding him were complicated, changing wildly on any given day.

  I took Diego home to meet my family one school break. We went to Owsley County for an afternoon, because Aunt Ruth had wanted to meet “this young feller my niece has been a-courtin’.” Ru
th and Sonny welcomed Diego into their home the best they knew how. Ruth couldn’t pronounce his name, but she apologized and, with a big smile, said, “We’ll just call you Dave.” She made corn bread and soup beans, and we ate in her small kitchen. I could see Diego’s eyes growing wide as Ruth and Sonny ate with their hands and talked with their mouths full.

  He didn’t say anything then, but his feelings came out in a fight just a few months later. He was visiting me for a few days, and I had made him mad for some reason or other. Probably because I had dinner with a friend he didn’t like, or didn’t call him back quickly enough. The fight quickly escalated. “You? Who are you?” he screamed at me, his eyes wide. “I’m something. I matter.” He said the words he knew would hurt me: “You’re nothing but a redneck from a redneck family. You don’t even matter.”

  He stormed out of the room, and I began to sob. Somehow he had figured it out: I was afraid that I would never belong in his high-society world.

  The next day I downloaded applications to transfer to Ivy League schools. Most of my decision was motivated by anger—I was angry at Diego for thinking that I didn’t belong, couldn’t belong, in institutions of such privilege. I was going to show him he was wrong.

  But I think part of my decision was motivated by fear, insecurity. I had stood on the periphery of the Ivy League that year, and I had never felt truly welcome. Maybe Diego was right. Maybe I really didn’t matter. Maybe going to one of these schools was the only thing that would make me matter. I never expected to get in, but I was glad I had finally taken my shot.

  A few months later I received my acceptance letter to Yale. I remember feeling something akin to confusion when I saw the large envelope stuffed in my college mailbox. I’d almost forgotten that I’d applied. My first emotion when I read the letter was elation. I was going to belong. In the Ivy League. My mind raced, thinking in feelings instead of words.