by T W Neal
They love me as much as they’re able, enough to let me go.
Chapter Forty-One
That Final Push
Age: 17-18, Santa Barbara, California, 1982-3
I lug a single suitcase, stuffed with all my worldly possessions, into Nancy’s old room in Santa Barbara. Her clothes and mementoes still fill every inch of the room, so I set the suitcase on the floor next to the bed to make it mine. I put my pillow on the bed and claim that too. School starts right away the next morning.
Maga and Egidio indulge in a carafe of red wine at dinner and a loud and good-natured argument on whether or not the Mafia is still running Naples (Maga says yes, Egidio claims no.) Patricia is gone, working at her job or class. I wolf down penne pasta with marinara and an iceberg lettuce salad, and consider how lucky I am to have a hot shower, flushing toilet, and TV after dinner.
I feel guilty to be here and have these comforts when my sisters are at home, eating brown rice, beans, and garden vegetables, and reading by the light of kerosene lamps. When I picture that scene, I miss them. Thinking about the family is a mistake. I turn up the radio in Nancy’s room.
No way out but forward. I need to keep my eyes straight ahead to accomplish all the goals I have for my senior year. I can’t look back; this is the chance I’ve been working toward for years.
Maga and Egidio’s modest 1960s ranch house is located on a keyhole-shaped loop of road in the foothills of Montecito. Built on a gulch of fire-prone eucalyptus trees, this place has been a solid family home for Nancy and Patricia their whole lives, and a sometime landing pad for us. Being here feels familiar but challenging on my own.
“No handholding,” Maga warned me. She’s made it clear she hasn’t signed up to be my substitute mom, and frankly that’s a relief. That also means that she drops me off the next morning on the road down below Santa Barbara High with a map and a bus schedule, on her way to her job at the unemployment office.
For the third time, I walk toward a school holding my birth certificate and immunization record to register myself. On my way, I pass the beautifully groomed expanse of the football field. Near one end is a cluster of girls, several in cheerleader uniforms, painting a large cloth sign for an upcoming game.
This is my chance to meet some kids at the top end of the social ladder on my very first day.
“Fake it ‘til you make it,” I mutter to myself, a saying from the twelve-step program. I trot down the steps of the bleachers onto the football field. I’m wearing jeans, Reeboks, and a scoop neck T-shirt that makes the most of my curves. I hope to look cute enough to blend, and approach the girls with a confidence I don’t feel.
“Hi. Can I help with that?”
One of them turns to give me a once-over. She’s blonde and pretty, wearing one of those pleated cheerleader skirts. “Sure. Grab a paintbrush.”
I unsling my backpack and drop it on the ground, pick up the paintbrush, and kneel beside her, filling in the outlined letters with the color she’s using, yellow.
“Olive and gold,” I say. “Nice.” I remember the school colors from when I went to junior high, briefly and long ago.
“I haven’t met you before.” Pretty Blonde is checking me out and I seem to pass muster. “My name’s Allison.”
I imagine this kind of moment at Kapa`a High, and am willing to bet my reception would have been a lot different. I feel a glimmer of hope that I’ve made the right choice. “I’m Toby. From Hawaii. I’m headed in to register for this year.”
“Hawaii! Oh my God! What grade are you in?”
“Senior.” This is the tricky part. Everyone has their friend groups by senior year. If I’m going to break in at all, I’m going to have to work hard at it, and I’m braced for that. “I wanted to get off my little rock of an island and go to a real high school.”
“Well, you’ve come to the right place,” Allison says proudly, sitting up on her knees. “This is the varsity cheerleader team. Everybody, this is Toby.” She makes a gesture, and all the girls look up and smile, waving their paintbrushes. “Let’s show her how we do it in Santa Barbara!”
And just like that, I’m in. It feels like a miracle, and maybe it is.
Allison and a cluster of cheerleaders walk me to the office, exclaiming at my bravery in registering by myself. I sit with them at lunch, and get invited to a house-to-house scavenger hunt party that week.
The scavenger hunt is a blast. We zoom around town, hopping in and out of Allison’s car in a “team,” asking for bizarre items from strangers (“Do you have a spork?”) and posing for Polaroid photos in front of Santa Barbara landmarks we have to check off a list, such as the famous plastic cow outside the ice cream parlor. It’s the most fun I ever remember having as a teenager.
“Fake it ‘til you make it” carries me on, and I become a Student Government member, the backup editor for the school paper, a runner on the track and cross-country team, and a lab helper in Physics class to earn extra credit because math remains my academic Achilles heel.
I buy a secondhand bike and ride down narrow, winding Sycamore Canyon Road every day to school, staying after to run with the cross country and track team or do student government activities. In the evenings, I ride the bike through the powdered gold light and red tile roofs of Santa Barbara to catch the bike bus, with its carrier on the back, up into the foothills.
I study How to Win at the SAT workbooks at the library, and take the test twice, hoping to improve my scores. Both times I get a perfect 800 on the verbal/written portion, but I can only inch the math score up another twenty points into “above average” by doing the workbook.
Things are not going as well at Maga’s. Patricia is friendly but seldom around. Nancy’s room, where I’m camping out, is where I’m assaulted by homesickness for my quirky family, for the lushness of Kauai, for surfing. Maga and Egidio’s dinnertime argue-fests, a norm for them, abrade my sensibilities and I withdraw into my room, listening to the radio, doing homework, and studying college brochures.
The other place I hang out when at the house is in the canyon. I take my drawing tablet or journal and sit in my old hideout under the deck, the secret spot where I made a fort when I was thirteen and played Barbies.
When I feel sad or lonely for the family, running soothes me. Going up the road, along the dirt track to Westmont College and jogging around the grounds lifts my mood. Sometimes I run for hours after school, until my thoughts and worries are finally quiet and my body is tired enough to sleep.
I keep going to the Christian Young Life Club that organized the scavenger hunt. While I’m wary of being proselytized to, I’m also semi-interested—hell, I’ve eaten off banana leaves with my fingers, had my third eye anointed, chanted the Hare Krishna, and been expected to kiss a pair of shoes. Jesus can’t be any weirder than that.
The thing that draws me most is that the nicest kids in school, like Allison, go to Club.
On a Young Life campout, they tell us that Jesus died to give us a new life and that all we have to do is accept that gift. After the campfire message, the leaders send us out into the dark to think about it.
Sitting in my surfer pose under unfamiliar pine trees, I look up at stars that are the same in California as they are in Hawaii, reducing me to a dot in the scheme of things—and consider the message that God cares about me.
I know that already, in a deep place. I’ve known it since the angel told me that things would be okay when we thought I was going blind. I matter, and I have something I’m meant to do in the world. I don’t know what it is, but if I have Jesus, I won’t be alone trying to figure it out. And I don’t want to be alone anymore, struggling to make my dreams happen on my own.
I bow my head and pray.
I like how much more “normal” it is to be Christian than a Krishna, Bahai, or Yogananda follower, and choosing my own religion feels like the first really adult decision I’ve made. It’s great to have Someone to rely on and pray to and to be able to name as my Higher Power.
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The Young Life leaders are a wonderful little family. They live only a block up the street from Maga’s house, and they have a toddler who reminds me of my own little Wendy. I meet with them weekly to learn about the Bible, and I babysit Taylor for them.
They invite me to move into their house as a part-time au pair, exchanging free food and lodging for babysitting Taylor. “It seems like you aren’t that happy at your grandmother’s, and we could use the help,” Bob says. Bob’s a thoughtful, hard-working dad who helps out at least fifty percent when he’s home. Wendy, his wife, has a big smile and always looks like she’s wearing tennis whites. Their house is small and perfect, the bathroom clean, the lawn neatly mowed.
“I’d love it! Thank you.”
With little fanfare and a big hug of thanks to Maga, I haul my suitcase up the street from my grandmother’s house to the Ludwicks’ tidy bungalow, and they install me in their pretty guest room.
Bob and Wendy are loving and generous with each other, and steady and structured as parents. They have a dog that they care for like a family member. Being in their home inspires me, clarifying amorphous dreams I’ve had of my own future.
“This. This is the kind of life and family I want someday,” I whisper to myself as I settle into my pretty bed.
Middle-class, not poor.
Owning a home instead of renting.
Driving a decent car, not a live-in van.
Going to church on Sundays and eating steak once a week, instead of meditating and eating tofu.
Jogging and the gym instead of surfing as a compulsion.
Owning a dog that you love enough to take to the vet—not drop off at the dump or give away to a stranger.
Hiring a lawn service, instead of being the lawn service.
Preschool, piano lessons, orthodontia, Scouts, and even college for the kids.
I’m still on a mission to be normal. It’s my rebellion.
I get serious with my college applications by November, and apply for Stanford and Harvard as well as a raft of second-tier colleges.
I know Ivy League is a stretch—but on the plus side, I have good test scores and a 4.0 GPA; on the negative, I lack extracurricular activities, I’ve been to three different high schools, I’m white and poor. My chances are slim for getting a good college offer, but I stay positive as I fill out earnestly worded essays and carefully completed applications well before deadline, without any adult help.
This is what I left Kauai for. This is my shot, and I’m taking it.
Chapter Forty-Two
And She’s Off
Bonny and me, teen years
Age: 18, Santa Barbara, California and Kauai, 1983
I go to Disneyland, and to football games, and to the prom with the older brother of one of my friends. I write articles that are printed in the school newspaper. I get excited about majoring in journalism so I can write as a career. I cover school events with my disposable camera for the newspaper and yearbook, earning social cachet.
My college acceptance letters come in spring, and Bob and Wendy rejoice with me when I get a full scholarship offer from both Boston University and nearby Westmont College in Santa Barbara. It’s happening! I’m really going to college, and all on my own.
I graduate in the top sixty in my class of six hundred, walking around SBHS’s vast football field in Nancy’s too-long, borrowed graduation gown from last year. My parents don’t come to my graduation, claiming they can’t afford it—but I try not to let it get me down. This is my road to walk, one they never understood, anyway. I’m the only kid in the stadium wearing a lei, a big carnation one sent from my family on Kauai.
I did it. I’m going to college at Boston University, on a full ride scholarship—because that will be the most exciting, glamorous, different…and the furthest from Hawaii.
A ticket home to Kauai to visit is my graduation present from Mom and Pop; it’s been a year since I’ve seen everyone. Planning for my trip, Mom tells me that the whole family got “saved” at a church that started up in the fellowship hall where I used to have hula lessons.
“The hymns and choruses would echo across the taro fields. It was so wonderful, we just had to go sing with them,” Mom says, and I picture her, in rubber slippers and her denim work muumuu, standing in the red dirt of the neighbor’s garage to use the phone just like I used to do. “We all went up and prayed at the altar. We’re Christians now!” I’m astounded at this, but hopeful it will give us something in common.
I spend the summer after graduation going to an educational program in Europe, paid for by Gigi and Grandpa Jim, who are thrilled I’m actually going to college. I see Paris from the Eiffel Tower, windsurf on a lake in Bavaria, eat sublime chocolate in Germany, and watch the gondolas from the Bridge of Sighs in Venice. I fall in love with glassblowing in Murano, am swept away by the club scene in London, swim for hours in Greece, eat ice cream in Rome, and hike the Alps to pick actual edelweiss in Austria.
Seven countries later, my eyes are filled with the sights, sounds, and scents of a great wide world that’s so much bigger than I’ve ever known. And finally, I go home for two weeks before I start at Boston University.
Coming down the steps off the Aloha Airlines flight onto the familiar tarmac, my hair lifts off my head in the warm, moist, plumeria-scented breeze of Kauai. Tears sting my eyes, and I know, running to embrace my three sisters in the shade of the funky open airport, that however far I go, this addicting island will always feel like home.
Adorable Wendy embraces my knees, sweet Anita my waist, and Bonny, now grown into an almost six-foot goddess, gets my arms. Mom and Pop, tan and grinning, both hug me at the end. They all pile me to the eyeballs in homemade plumeria lei as people do in Hawaii when someone graduates. A moment I wish would never end passes too quickly.
A lot has changed for the family in the year I was gone. Gigi and Grandpa Jim built them a house in Princeville, the former cow pasture on the mesa above Hanalei Bay. Pulling into the new place’s clean cement driveway, I raise my brows—they’re driving a Toyota station wagon and a shiny truck, and the huge house has beige wall-to-wall.
“Watch out or you’ll be getting respectable or something,” I tease Mom, looking around the brand-new home.
“Gigi and Jim might have bought us the house and cars, but I’m still growing my own sprouts,” Mom says, pointing at a variety of mung bean, sunflower, and alfalfa decorating the sink in familiar glass jars covered with rubber-banded cheesecloth. She’s planted a papaya and banana patch and, in spite of neighborhood covenants, has a henhouse started and is deep in compost development.
Pop, meanwhile, has expanded his guitar playing to worship music, picking out classics like Jesus loves me, this I know. His business teaching windsurfing lessons is booming. He finally seems to have found work that he likes, and a venue for his music where it can be appreciated.
“Got a friend coming over for dinner tonight,” Mom tells me after I get my suitcase stowed in one of the downstairs rooms. “A nice guy who’s been helping your dad and me learn the Bible. We’re all volunteering at a youth camp in Koke`e this coming week; I hope you don’t mind because we’re all going.”
“Sure.” I’m determined to be pleasant and cooperative, though the last thing I want is to spend my first night home having family dinner with some fuddy-duddy old Bible thumper, and the rest of a precious week before college volunteering at a religious camp.
The fuddy-duddy old Bible thumper turns out to be late twenties, six foot four, with the lithe muscles of a surfer. Mike has to bend to give me a welcoming hug, and his shoulders block out the light. Dark hair contrasts with eyes the color of crushed glass, and they seem to see all the way into my soul. “So, you’re the wayward daughter I’ve been hearing so much about.”
“I guess. Not very wayward, actually. Normal is my rebellion.” I laugh self-consciously.
“I’ve been praying for you with your parents. It’s great how things worked out for your family. Co
ngrats on your graduation—I hear you did really well.”
“Thanks.” It feels way too intimate that he’s spent time praying for me! Heat flashes over my cheeks, and I look away.
My sisters are helping Mom with dinner in the kitchen, but I catch Bonny’s eye. She’s grinning at my discomfiture.
“Toby’s on her way to college at Boston University.” Mom’s voice is indulgent as she brings a pot of her Swiss chard and brown rice soup to the table. “She’s going as far away from Kauai as she can, getting all high maka maka.” The pidgin phrase means someone’s getting above themselves.
“Mom! I just want to—you know. Reach my potential. Do something important. I have to leave Kauai to do that.” I trip over my awkwardly self-important words. “I’m majoring in journalism,” I tell Mike.
“As long as you don’t write about Kauai and how great it is,” Mike says, and we all laugh. The Cone of Silence about Kauai is still firmly in place as far as media goes.
Pop is playing his guitar in the background, his default mode for social situations. He puts his instrument away, and we all sit down. Mike is next to me, and I have to hold his big warm hand as Pop says a simple grace.
Around the dinner table we end up having a lively discussion about the reasons people move to Hawaii and why they leave.
“The islands either accept you, or spit you out. We’ve had both,” Pop says. They reminisce about some of our moves back and forth from Kauai, joking about our various living situations. It feels good to be far enough away from those desperate times that here, in the comfort of this big new house, we can laugh about them.