Maybe I was expecting everybody to have my experience, which was the same as gorging myself at a feast every day after living on nuts and raisins. I felt extremely lucky. I pitied the eighteen-year-olds in the back of the class, the gum-snapping, ‘hair-slouching, class-skipping, bad-habits-from-high-school students. They were probably being forced into attendance by their parents. But they were in the minority. In the front of the class, at the other end of the spectrum, were the highly polite grandmothers, some sharp-tongued middle-aged women, a nun, and a retired insurance salesman. The majority of the students, though, were about my age, which was twenty-four, and fellow victims of a previously rocky life. There were some GI-bill Vietnam vets, other mothers of small children, though they were mostly married, and then there were my two new friends—Arlene and Lizzy. Arlene was a native of Middletown and used to run with a girl’s gang in high school. She had a scar on her shoulder from a knife fight and a tattoo on her knuckle. Now she wrote the most beautiful poems, using nature for metaphors, and worked as a book-keeper. Lizzy had actually hitchhiked to California and back, sold her plasma to buy food, and lived in a tent by a river, then came home to find that her boyfriend, who supposedly played guitar like Jimi Hendrix, had offed himself the day before. Then Lizzy lost her voice and was committed to the state mental institution until the words came back four months later. Now she worked there with autistic children.
I met Lizzy and Arlene my second semester, after I’d already decided I had to get all A’s. I had a lot to prove because of past life failure, but I also wanted A’s because in my first month at Middlesex, I’d overheard a woman in my history class telling her neighbor that she was planning on getting a scholarship to Wesleyan University. I thought she was lying or at least deluded, because although Wesleyan was in the same town as Middlesex, it cost about a hundred times more and was mainly for kids with board scores of 1400 and diplomas from prep schools. I butted into her conversation just to see how far her lying would go. “How can you go to Wesleyan from here?” I asked her.
She said it was easy if you got all A‘s, because they had this scholarship called Etherington, for community-college students. I had an instantaneous fantasy. I’d get a scholarship. I’d be the only person in the whole school who was on welfare. A bunch of socialists with a severe case of societal guilt would befriend me and make me a working-class hero.
I went home and read the riot act to Jason. “I have to get all A‘s,” I said, “and you have to help. If ever you see me reading a book or writing a paper, don’t interrupt no matter what,”
“What if I get cut?”
“Well, if you get cut.”
“What if Andrew’s throwing rocks?”
“Jason, use your own judgment.”
“What if Annie’s smoking butts?”
“Jason!”
“I don’t like it when you study.”
“You want me to stay poor and stupid and on welfare forever?”
“No.”
“Then don’t interrupt.”
Silence.
“Okay?”
“I guess.”
I developed a talent for pure concentration, which enabled me to hear absolutely nothing when I was reading or writing. In fact if Jason wanted my attention, he had to pull on my sleeve. When Jason had his friends up in his room on winter afternoons and they’d be arguing over who got to go first or accusing each other of cheating or playing hide-and-seek and making the ceiling sound like thunder above me, I’d be trying to figure the value of X, Y, or Z and hearing none of it. I succeeded in getting all A‘s—which wasn’t hard once I figured all I had to do was tell the professor what he or she had already said; or if that was too much of a personal compromise, I simply had to make my own opinion as outrageous as possible. I applied to Wesleyan in the spring of 1975 but would not hear until the summer, because they needed my second-semester grades before they decided.
Finally it was summer, a Wednesday, and I’d gone to my last women’s consciousness-raising-group meeting. We were breaking up because we were only five, and one woman was moving while another was leaving for the summer. We had a potluck dinner for the occasion and each of us brought a bottle of wine, which meant by the time we were finished eating, we were pretty loaded. Somebody put Joni Mitchell on the stereo, and one of the women got up and started dancing. Then we all got up. I had my eyes closed and was singing along, “I am on a lonely road and I am traveling traveling traveling, looking for something what can it be,” and when I opened my eyes, I saw that my fellow women had taken their shirts off.
Now, the first thing I thought was, What would Fay say? With the exception of one, these women were homely; in high school I would’ve called them skanks and never given them the time of day. I pictured Fay’s face at the window, laughing at me dancing with a bunch of half-naked skanks. Then I decided Fay and her reaction was her problem. I liked these women. They’d listened to my whole story—starting with a father who spied on me at the same time he ignored me, and ending with one feckless no-caring lay after another—and they’d listened with intelligence, good questions (“Why when you talk about making love do you always say sex? Do you make no distinction?”), and compassion.
Now I wanted to take my shirt off and join my friends. But it had been a long time since I went shirt-less, since the age of eight to be exact, unless you wanted to count bouncing around in bed with a couple of dozen lovers, which I didn’t.
I closed my eyes, took a breath, and lifted my shirt off. The air against my skin felt like the opposite of a caress. It was chilling. It was stimulating. To belabor a word, it was liberating. I realized it never would have felt so freeing if it hadn’t been so long since I’d done it, and that there is something to be said for deprivation—which is the feeling you get when it’s over.
The next morning, I got the envelope from Wesleyan. I’d been accepted. They were giving me an apartment on campus. My blood pressure dropped. Little sparkles swarmed over the page I was reading. I put my head between my knees to let the blood flow to my brain, and to let the information sink in. This meant I’d leave Wallingford, probably forever. I would leave one life and enter another. I lifted my head, and the sparkles were gone.
CHAPTER 13
SEVEN years after Raymond and I had moved into our mint-green duplex apartment as man and wife, my father, my mother, my brother, Jason, and I loaded two flowered living room chairs, given to me by the woman who’d made my wedding suit, Fay’s mother’s kitchen set, Jase’s and my bedroom furniture, and boxes of everything else into my father’s truck early on Labor Day morning 1975. I was to follow the truck in Cupcake. After everybody left, I went back into my house for a last look.
The house had a feeling of about-to-be, like it had already forgotten us and was waiting for its next experience. In my former bedroom, I riveted on some small black smears dotting the walls. They were the stains of dead mosquitoes from our first summer, before we had screens, when the mosquitoes made a feast of my pregnant body every evening, and then every morning as they slept, I whapped them to death with a rolled-up magazine. Looking at the remains of their massacre, which I never washed off, painted over, or hardly noticed for seven years, I wondered if that girl, who suffered through sleepless itchy nights rather than save herself with the purchase of screens, who could ignore her own dried blood on the walls for seven years, could ever be a normal person—and by that I meant could I survive, fit in, resist the urge to fuck up and ruin everything.
The house I’d been assigned on campus was not exactly beautiful. It was covered with haphazard gray shingles and had four small low-ceilinged rooms, with no light except for in the kitchen, plus brown-painted floorboards that slanted toward the middle. I decided to think of this place as my little college cottage. It had a porch and a grill made of rocks out back, bushes, flowers, and trees with squirrels jetting around the branches. It was on a pitted dead-end street at the edge of campus, called Knowles Avenue, and as we pulled up, I noticed
a couple of kids riding their bikes down the hill next to the hockey rink across the street and wondered if they’d be friends of Jason’s and who my friends would be.
It was still morning when we started unloading. My mother took command. “Your brother will help your father with the heavy stuff. I don’t want you hurting your back.... Better put the bed there, away from the window or you’ll get a draft.... If you put your canned foods closer to the stove, it’ll be more efficient. . . . I always put the glasses above the sink.... What? Aren’t you going to put paper on your shelves? ...” She was out of hand. I was letting her get away with murder. What did she think, I was still that pregnant teenager she moved into the other apartment?
Everything had been moved in. My brother’s friend had picked him up, and my father was walking around the hockey rink with Jason. My mother had cleaned the refrigerator, and was finishing the stove, when I sat on my bed, dropped my head into my hands, and thought how it was almost dusk and there might be a beautiful sunset, but how would I know? If I’d moved in with friends, we might be sitting on the porch, ordering pizza, buying beers, having arguments about anchovies or no anchovies. Why’d I let my parents assume they’d do the moving?
This was my frame of mind when I stepped out of my bedroom and into the kitchen and spotted my mother moving the kitchen table to a different wall from the one I’d placed it against. “What the fuck do you think gives you the right to move that table?” I yelled.
“You’ll get too much sun. I just thought ...”
“You just thought you knew better. You just thought I was an imbecile. Get it straight. This is my house.”
“Well.” She puffed herself up.
I wasn’t giving her a chance to talk. As far as I was concerned, she had no defense. “Ma, I know this is hard for you to take, but I’m different from you and I’m going to live a different life. Starting right here and now—with where I put the fucking Campbell’s soup.” I took a can and moved it from next to the stove to above the sink.
“Then I guess you don’t need me anymore. We’d better go.”
Now I felt like shit. “Well, we’re moved in. You must be tired.”
“Sonny,” she called outside. She unclasped her cigarette case, took out a Kent, and lit it with a lighter. My father followed Jason in. He wiped his face with his handkerchief, crossed his ankles, and leaned against the stove. “All done?” he said.
“Come here,” she said to Jason.
“You going already?” Jason said.
“You’re going to miss your Mim, I know,” she said.
Jason hugged her hips. She’d be a toll call away now. No way she’d stop by on her way to anywhere ever again. I felt like I was one of those Nazi death camp people shoving Jase into one line and her and my father into another.
She kissed Jase on the cheek, then pressed her pocketbook against her stomach and looked like she might cry as my father put his hand on the middle of her back and guided her out the door. “Don’t be strangers now,” she said through the car window as they pulled away.
The next morning at nine o‘clock, Jase and I were standing in line at the Science Center, the modem building on campus, for registration. I’d been afraid people would stare at me because I’d be the only older person (twenty-five in a few days) and I’d be the only one with a kid. I was the oldest person there and the only one with a kid all right, but I was also the only one who noticed. Since I might as well be invisible, it was safe to take a look around, and what I saw were people cut from a different mold. The guys had overdeveloped heads and underdeveloped bodies and the girls had frizzy hair, backpacks, and frozen-faced expressions. I felt like the Student from Another Planet.
Jase had put on his Night of the Living Dead face and said, “How long do we have to stay here?”
“Until we get to the head of the line.”
The line was the length of a football field. “Oh brother,” he said, making like he might start crying. I was nervous enough, specifically, that once I got to the head of the line, they’d say, “Beverly Who? I’m sorry. You’re not on the list.”
“Jason! I don’t need it,” I said in a yell disguised as a whisper, then a tall lanky guy touched my shoulder and said, “Excuse me, is this the line for registration?”
“I guess,” I said. What else would it be?
“Excuse me,” he said, turning to the girl behind me. “Is this the line for registration?”
“Quite,” she said.
Quite? Who in the world said quite? Was this what I’d have to choose from for friends? Why had I been in such a hurry to transfer from community college when I could’ve stayed there another year before I made this flying leap into whitebreadsville. A chubby guy butted in line in front of me. “Marcy!” he effused. “I can’t believe you’re going here too.”
“Josh! My God. This is so cool,” she said.
“I just got here,” he said. “I can’t tell you how much I miss my baby grand already.”
Miss his baby grand? These kids were rich. Going to a school where a year’s tuition could clothe, feed, and put a roof over a family of six’s heads had been an expectation, like toilet paper in the bathroom, for most of these people. How could I ever relate? A drop of perspiration dripped from my temple. When the line moved forward, I stepped on the back of the fat kid’s shoe.
He turned around.
“Excuse me,” I said.
He smiled and turned back to Marcy.
“Ma, you did that on purpose,” Jase whispered.
“So?”
“Why?”
“It makes me mad he’s so rich.”
“Why?”
“Because we’re not, I guess.”
“We’re not poor, though?”
“No. And it’s not even important to be rich. It’s probably better to be poor. It’s just that some people take it for granted and never think about people who aren’t.”
“I’m going to be rich,” Jason said. “If I stepped on his shoe, you’d yell at me.”
“What are you, my conscience?”
“What’s that?”
“The voice inside your head that tells you when you’re wrong.”
“No.”
“Just remember. You’re the kid and I’m the mother.”
“Yes, little girl,” Jason said.
When I thought about this later, I wondered if I wasn’t being as bad as my own mother by not allowing other people to be different—the way she wouldn’t allow another place for the Campbell’s soup.
Still, I was paralyzed by Fear of the Different and did nothing but study, which I expected would pay off. So when my professor asked me to come see him after I’d worked four days on, then handed in, my first English paper, I thought that maybe, like one of the professors at Middlesex had, he was going to invite me to contribute to the school magazine. Still, I was a bundle of nerves when I entered his office. Professors at Middlesex were regular people, while this professor had a goatee like a devil, an accent like Katharine Hep-burn‘s, and did stuff like turn red in the face and burst forth lines by Wordsworth: “’Great God! I’d rather be a Pagan suckled on a creed outworn ...‘” This he said after storming into class and railing about a gas station attendant who’d just called him Bub. What if I used incorrect grammar? What if he asked me a question using a word I didn’t know?
He sat in a leather chair across from me instead of behind his desk and smiled kindly. “You have trouble writing,” he said.
I forgot to breathe. “I come from community college,” I said by way of explanation.
“Yes,” he said by way of saying he could tell.
Then he recommended I take a remedial writing course, for no credit. I could barely control my trembling lip in his office. I went into the bathroom and cried, sitting on the toilet. I could not flunk out, I simply couldn’t. I knew I was the poor relation being let in through the back door of this place, but I’d thought—maybe academically, at least—I’d do all right. T
he humiliation was even more intense because I’d fantasized that when I graduated from college, I’d move to New York and be a writer. I took a handful of toilet paper and blew my nose. There was another roll of paper still wrapped up. That’s Wesleyan for you, I thought as I walked out, extra paper in every stall. Not a speck of dirt or mess anywhere, every window in every ancient building opened with a lift of a finger, every lawn was manicured perfect, and there wasn’t a dead branch on a single tree.
I’d only be depressed if I went home, so I wandered through the arts complex, which was a group of square limestone buildings scattered here and there under pine trees. The place was unreal. It looked like a moon- scape. I passed a student reading a poem out loud under a tree. They were all over the place—skipping, singing, playing the flute. A woman stood under an arch and played the bagpipes. This, I thought, is a far cry from Susan Gerace playing “Taps” in the project.
Susan Gerace, who I’d heard had joined the marines, probably had no idea a place like Wesleyan existed. In Wallingford, if you crossed the street in the middle instead of on a corner, people would beep and you might get arrested. God forbid you should talk to yourself; they might lock you in an attic. One moonless night last week, I’d run as fast as I could with my arms outstretched across the athletic field, leaping across a puddle and splattering myself with mud, and I’d thought one day I’d follow it up with skipping on a sidewalk. I never wanted to forget where I came from or what it was like there, because places like that were where most of the rest of the world lived—and as far as I could tell, they were populated by much more interesting people—but I didn’t want to live there anymore, either.
Riding in Cars With Boys: Confessions of a Bad Girl Who Makes Good Page 13