Also, the emphasis on reading—from the very beginning of my Catholic education right through the Great Books course I had in high school—gave me a lifelong passion for libraries. (In my role as an elected official, I’ve always been a big advocate for keeping libraries open and protecting them from budget cuts. In my early years as City Council Speaker, when there was a budget surplus, we restored funding so that libraries could stay open six days a week instead of five.)
I’m not a fast reader, so it takes me longer than most to finish a book. But I loved the way we learned. Our teachers were terrific. Our classes were interestingly structured. We had a marvelous program in our junior and senior years that put English, history, and theology together under Area Studies. They were team-taught by the three separate departments. One year you did Europe. The next year you did the United States. They put the juniors and seniors together. We had great literature classes. Some of our classes were held in the convent, so we would sit on couches and comfy chairs and listen and talk. That place probably gave me the best sense of confidence about my intellectual abilities.
In grammar school, I had loved reading the biographies of great political and civil rights leaders like Eleanor Roosevelt, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and John F. Kennedy, and Bobby Kennedy, and Martin Luther King Jr. I learned so much from biographies of nonpoliticians who did important things, like Helen Keller; Booker T. Washington; George Washington Carver, who was born a slave and became a leading botanist; Molly Pitcher, who fought in the Revolutionary War; Marie Curie, who discovered polonium and radium; and Dr. Charles Drew, who discovered plasma. Those biographies got me hooked on politics and government, which I came to love. I saw the evidence that one person could have a positive impact on the world. The biographies also inspired me to want to do something—and to maybe even be the first at something—that made a difference in people’s lives.
Academics and reading weren’t the only inspiring parts of high school for me. For example, you might not think that organizing Sports Night at Old Westbury was the beginning of a life in politics, but I was one of the lead organizers, and I loved it. Lots of schools did it. Some call it Sports Night, but others call it Color Night. Half the school was the blue team, and half the school was the white team, and we had themes. So you’d have to do an entrance that was on the theme, and a dance, and cheerleading, and there’d be athletics. People would work on Sports Night for months. You either did it perfunctorily or you got totally into it. I got totally into it.
My freshman year the theme was “The Wild, Wild White West,” because I was on the white team. Another year it was a mythology theme, and another it was “The Great White Way.” My father always jokes that between the political demonstrations I organize, which can include costumes and thematic signs, my professional career is just an extension of Sports Night. I loved the group activity of it. I actually loved every big activity in high school. I was editor of the newspaper and senior class president—not such a feat in a class of twenty-four. But we had fun both in school and outside. And I had my own car, which made getting to school and going out on weekends a lot easier.
I had all the freedom a teenager could want, probably too much. My father never set a curfew—I came and went as I pleased. I don’t think he was prepared for raising a typical teenage daughter, especially since my sister hadn’t gone out a lot when she was in high school. And now that my mother was gone, he was thrust into this role that he had no frame of reference for. In the generation in which he grew up, it was the wife’s job to set the rules and keep tabs on what the children were doing. I didn’t always make it easy for him, and I don’t think he was always happy about the things I chose to do, but he never said a word.
Aunt Julia, who still lived with us, financed my social life in the kindest manner. She devised a way to be my unofficial banker. I didn’t have a formal allowance, so whenever I needed money, I’d go to her underwear drawer. She kept a statue of the Virgin Mary in the drawer, and inside the statue was a place where she’d stash bills. She always made sure there were plenty of twenty-dollar bills there, so if I needed cash, I’d take twenty or forty out of Mary. Julia must have checked regularly, because the statue always held what I needed.
My friends and I traveled in packs, mostly, and we had fun. This part of life is when many teenagers start drinking. On a typical weekend, a group of us would go to Manhattan to the Limelight or the Palladium. Or when we stayed on Long Island, we’d go to Malibu in Lido Beach or to TR’s (for Teddy Roosevelt) in Williston Park. We’d go out around nine or ten and meet up with other friends. Sometimes one or more of the girls would bring along a boyfriend or an older brother. Then you’d just go and hang out, dance, and drink. If you weren’t driving, you’d drink until you were drunk. It certainly wasn’t sophisticated, but getting smashed didn’t seem out of the ordinary, at least among the people I knew. We’d sometimes make our way home at three or four in the morning.
From early on I assumed that I wasn’t going to have a romantic life. I just wrote it off. So when my friends talked about boys they liked, the ones they found attractive, and which ones they were going to pursue, it felt irrelevant to me. I had my own philosophy, my own set of goals. I was going to make something of myself. I was going to help people. I was going to have fun. But as far back as I can remember, I subscribed to the belief that you can’t have everything. I had friends, I was smart, and I did pretty well in school, and that was enough. I didn’t worry about my sexuality. I didn’t feel much of anything. I had a couple of dates with boys, and they didn’t work, so I went back to the group and put all other thoughts out of my mind.
My friends and I were a close-knit group, and the fact that there were no boys romantically in my life didn’t bother me at all. What bothered me was being what I believed was overweight and unattractive. My sadness and my lack of physical self-confidence meshed together, leaving me feeling powerless and desperate to fix this aspect of my life. I had failed to make my mother better. I had given up on romance. I had to succeed at losing weight. I had to get control over something in my life, and controlling my weight, therefore, became my obsession.
I decided that self-induced vomiting was the answer. I started making myself sick when I was sixteen. It never helped me lose weight. Clearly that wasn’t what it really was about.
And on top of how I felt about the way I looked, I was sad and lonely in the aftermath of my mother’s death. When I looked in the mirror, I saw a fat, motherless kid with pimples who couldn’t figure out how to dress or do her hair or do any of the things girls are supposed to know how to do.
But see, the trouble is you start self-inducing vomiting for one reason, or at least you think that’s why you’re doing it, and it becomes a way to escape the things you’re really feeling. By excessively overeating, you become numbed out. Which is a great place to be if you’re feeling any of the overwhelming things I was feeling as a teenager. And by physically vomiting, you’re expelling more than the ridiculous amounts of food you’ve ingested. You’re expelling whatever you’re feeling, whatever you don’t understand, all of your difficulties—you’re just getting rid of them. I was throwing up the pain of my mother’s death, the overwhelming guilt I felt for my role in her sad life, and my sorrow, my mountains of sorrow.
The other thing you’re doing, by self-inducing vomiting, is making your body do something it’s not supposed to do. And if you are in an exceedingly out-of-control situation, you’ve mastered control over something, which gives you a false sense of power.
The bulimia and the drinking didn’t have much significance to me then, because I thought everybody was doing it and I assumed I would stop when I wanted to. I was young and thought I was having a good time and could not see into the future. I didn’t know that these ways of coping with misery and guilt would follow me for years. Not until I was an adult would I come to deal with them.
Now when I think about my belief that I was overweight, I realize I was actually wrong.
After my mother died, my father and Aunt Julia and I took a trip to Maine to look at colleges. When I look at pictures of myself on that trip, I don’t see a fat girl. I looked perfectly reasonable. But when I was a small child, I was clearly very chubby. When I was in high school, I thought I was fat, but the pictures don’t bear that out. Unfortunately, my self-image and my need to use it against myself was already set by high school, and it’s been something I’ve struggled with ever since.
At that point in my life, I wasn’t aware in any conscious way that my sexuality contributed to my sense that I was different. Mostly it felt like whatever was wrong with me was a deficiency of some sort, which was somehow linked to my responsibility for my mother’s illness. I rationalized it by thinking that some people are tall, and some people are short. Some people have a romantic life and feel good about how they look, and some people don’t. Not until college did I realize I was destined to have a romantic life after all, but it wasn’t the kind of romantic life I had planned for.
CHAPTER 5
What I Learned in College
I left home for Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, in the fall of 1984. My friends had helped me shop and pack. My father, my friend Dorothy, and I drove up in separate cars. I was excited, of course, and nervous about leaving home.
But leave home I did. I didn’t go home on weekends or call home every Sunday. Ellen lived in Connecticut and was only a half hour away, so I had a great safety net and saw her a lot. My dad and I didn’t call each other often, but we stayed in close touch in our nontraditional eccentric ways. For example, our primary way of communicating was through his interoffice memo that included a hundred-dollar check. “To: Christine; From: LQ.” Or “To: Christine; From: Mr. Quinn.” Usually he said nothing else in the memo, but occasionally he’d write, “Attached please find an article I thought you would find of interest.” And there’d be a newspaper clipping about Glen Cove or his old neighborhood in the city or something political. That was my father’s way, and it still is. You know he’s always thinking of you, and his actions speak louder than his words. He wasn’t a cuddly father, but he was so endlessly dedicated and attentive and always there when I needed him. He still is.
Just as he had in high school, my father came to every college event he was invited to. He missed only one big occasion when I was at Trinity. It was a parents’ weekend, something he loved to attend. But my sophomore year there was a strike at work, and he was a shop steward. He felt bad about missing the weekend, but there was no way he would abandon his responsibilities to travel to Hartford and, besides, he didn’t have the money to spend on the weekend. I felt bad that he couldn’t make it, but I admired him for his loyalty to his fellow workers.
The fact that my father was the member of a union also made me something of a standout at school. I remember when I’d use my credit card, which was issued by the union, at the college bookstore, they’d take a look at the image on the front of the card—hands locked in a solidarity shake—and look confused or stunned. They weren’t being rude about it; they just couldn’t process it, because it was out of place for them.
My father called Trinity the preppiest place in America. So when it came to like-minded progressives, there weren’t a lot of us. However, the faculty was much more liberal than the students, so I felt I had the support I needed when it came to expressing my political views and doing activism on campus. And because I was an activist working on all kinds of issues and outspoken in general—and probably because of my very loud laugh—I got a reputation for being brash. No doubt I cemented that reputation when I became the Bantam, Trinity’s mascot. Here’s the story of that.
A bantam is a big fighting rooster, but of course we couldn’t have the real thing at Trinity football games. Instead, we had a human inside a bantam costume. It had a big, poufy orange-yellow chest and a head with a beak. The person inside the costume wore orange-gold tights, little yellow feathery shorts, and a blue T-shirt that had a “T” on it. My freshman year I would complain about how awful the Bantam was at the football games. He didn’t do much more than walk back and forth and flap his arms. And my friends said, “Stop complaining. You should be the Bantam next year.” So I said, “Okay, I’m gonna be the Bantam next year.” And I was! I don’t think there was much competition for this exalted job, but it was fun. My role as the Bantam was to excite the crowd, torture the cheerleaders by hitting them with their pom-poms, and get the crowd to do chants. And besides, most people didn’t know who was underneath the costume, so I had a lot of freedom to be as silly as I wanted.
Then there was the time I got beaten up. Wesleyan was our rival, and I went over to their side and started running up and down, taunting them. Some guys came down from the stands and started pouring beer all over me, pulling on my beak, and tugging on me. My friend Jon, who was calling the game on the air, sent out an SOS: “This is not a joke! Someone is beating up the Bantam. The Bantam is on the Wesleyan side, and she’s getting attacked. Please, people, help.” I couldn’t get them to stop, so I had to haul around and clock one of the guys. And when I screamed at him, he said, “Oh, I didn’t know you were a girl. Sorry.” I was all wet and droopy-beaked and had to limp back over to Trinity’s side. I went up to the dean of students and said, “Can you believe this? They poured beer on me and were really mean to me.” He said, “I hope you had your mouth open,” and walked away.
I liked Trinity. There was plenty of social life, and there were lots of different kinds of groups of people. I didn’t mind being one of the few liberals on campus—that was totally fine. I hung out with football players, and the jock crowd, and then I hung out with the hippie crowd in the fraternity I joined. I liked bopping around between groups. It was all fun and good, but I was also adrift personally, and because I was never completely rooted in one group it added to that.
I just didn’t really care about the classes. They all seemed sort of irrelevant, and they were difficult for me. Until then, school had been a breeze. But college was another thing entirely. I didn’t have particularly great study skills, because I’d never had to study that hard before. I am also an unbelievably slow reader, who has to read things a couple of times to digest them. There’s a lot of reading in college, and I just couldn’t get through it. I had a hard time keeping up. Truth is, I may not have tried that hard, but I bet if you’d asked people, they would’ve thought I was doing very well in classes. In reality, I was basically just getting by. And then the loss of my mother in the years before college had left me sad and overwhelmed, which made focusing on classes even harder.
I couldn’t shrug off the grief and the guilt. They were an enormous distraction, especially when I was supposed to be studying. Even though I knew intellectually, at sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, that I wasn’t, I nonetheless felt completely and exclusively responsible for the fact that my mother had gotten sick again and had died. There was little doubt in my mind that it was my fault. I thought that if I had been more attentive to her medications, if I had never shown impatience, or if I had been less demanding, she would have survived. That idea plagued me at college and for many years afterward.
It was part and parcel of my attitude toward myself. On the one hand, I was an energetic leader and a world-class Bantam, but on the other I was not very good at my studies and still overweight. And I was drinking a lot and vomiting a lot. However, I also knew that if I threw myself into an activity, any activity that mattered to me, things would feel a lot better. Maybe I was just keeping with my family tradition. Think of my mother, ill with cancer, putting on theme birthday parties; or me in high school pulling out all the stops for Sports Night; or my father—despite the burdens of having a sick wife, an elderly mother-in-law, and a sister-in-law living at home—working on the picket line when his men were on strike.
Activity. It was the way of my family, and Trinity was where I discovered my passion for activism. Not that politics was a new interest for me. I was fascinated by it as a kid. I remember wonde
rful times when I was in my teens, over dinner at my friend’s house, when I’d go toe to toe with her father over current events. He was very conservative, and for the most part I managed to hold my own.
I paid close attention when my father talked about his union work and about Democratic politics. His membership in the union guaranteed medical care for our family. If we hadn’t had that insurance, my mother’s medical expenses might well have bankrupted us.
He gave me two reasons why he was a Democrat. First, he’d say, “Because they met us at the boat.” By that he meant the Democrats were there for his family when they came over from Ireland (because the Democrats were—and are—for immigrants). And second, he’d say, “FDR saved my life.” He believed deeply that FDR’s policies saved his family’s lives in the Depression.
I was eager to get involved in such a way that I felt I was having an impact. At the time, there was a big movement on college campuses across the country to get colleges and universities to pull their investments out of South African companies and any companies that did business with South Africa because of that government’s apartheid policy. It was an important international movement that helped bring an end to a totally discriminatory government. We got the Trinity student government to pass a resolution urging the college to divest, and a shantytown was set up on campus to represent the shantytowns where South African blacks were restricted to living. Trinity students slept overnight in the shanties. I was so proud to be a part of this effort and felt I was making a difference in some small way.
The best discovery I made at Trinity was that I could do internships through ConnPIRG, an environmental and consumer protection group (founded by Ralph Nader) that watches out for people’s interests and “stands up to powerful interests whenever they threaten our health and safety, our financial security or our right to fully participate in our democratic society.”
With Patience and Fortitude: A Memoir Page 5