Riding In Cars With Boys (16 page)

By the time I stepped out of the shower, you could say I’d talked myself into feeling macho. I dried off, then put on my farmer’s jeans and dropped a pen and a pencil in the pouch at my chest, which naturally made me think about writing something, which made me think about learning-which was the whole point of college, after all—and I got the jitters again. I figured now I’d have to prove I was as smart as I’d always thought. This would not be easy. I’d taken pride in being a borderline moron in high school and maybe now I’d pay for it. For all I knew, I might get thrown into remedial classes, in which case my pride would force me to jump out a window.

Down in the living room, I paused to look at Cupcake before making coffee. She shimmered like an emerald in the driveway. Behind her, a piece of paper skimmed along the gutter propelled by spurts of wind. I figured that paper was some kid’s spelling homework. My chest filled, and I had to stop myself from crying. I could hardly believe my good fortune. I was joining the human race.

Then Jason came slouching through the room. He was capable of black Donofrio male moods, the silent broods. He could be the slug that came to breakfast, lunch, or dinner. And the last thing I needed right now was him acting like a dark cloud and reminding me of what had held me back from everything in life so far.

I knew he felt needy now because his mother was going off to college, but when he sat at the table and stared dazedly at nothing, I figured it was for attention and it pissed me off. It put me on the alert for kids-making-mothers-turn-cartwheels behavior. I said, “So what’re you having for breakfast?”

“What is there?”

“What do I look like, the waitress? You want a menu?”

“Maybe I’ll have Rice Krispies,” he said.

“They’re going to come floating to the table and pouring into your bowl, like a commercial?”

“No,” he said, pushing his chair back hard and going to get the Rice Krispies.

“Today’s my first day of college, remember?” I asked rhetorically, wanting to put the issue on the table.

“I know,” he said, pouring milk on his cereal, then spooning two spoons of sugar in.

“Sugar’s bad for you,” I said.

“Can I come?” he said.

“No, you can’t.”

“Will you be home when I get home?” He was six years old and already knew how to act like an Italian husband.

“Aren’t I always?”

“No.”

“When have I ever left you home alone?”

“Once. I went over to Cassie’s. Remember?”

“Oh, right. Excuse me. I was ten minutes late. You could’ve died.”

“I could.”

Being liberated did not just mean from men but from attitudes and kids, and Jason was not going to make me feel guilty about doing anything I wanted.

When he came back downstairs from brushing his teeth, I noticed his ears sticking out of his hair and that he was holding his Mighty Heroes lunch pail. For some reason the sight of him made me giddy. Then, when I hugged him goodbye and felt how small his bones were, how small he really was, I probably hugged him too long, because he squirmed and said, “Ma, the bus.”

As I drove to school up winding roads, by cow pastures and cornfields, I slowed down for a blind curve and thought of Raymond’s car accident. Where was Raymond, anyway? What did he do every day? Did he have new kids? Did he ever wonder about me? Then I wondered what the hell I was doing on my first day of college thinking about a junkie husband. Maybe good fortune made me think of bad. Maybe when things start to change, you want to hold on to something familiar.

 

Middlesex Community College was a bunch of flat, new, economically constructed buildings bunched up on a hill, with as much parking lot as class space. It was a school for commuters that was not long on beauty or aesthetics or little extras like protection from glaring sun in windows, but it was paradise to me. It was an inspiration of the sixties, a college of last resort. If you were a jerk-off in high school, this is where you could start over. If you were formerly too poor for college, you could go now, because Middlesex was cheap. Plus, they had counselors there to get you loans.

The education? Maybe because the students mostly had no money, we were often assigned one textbook per course that digested material for you instead of going to the sources, which was a little too much like high school for me.

Teachers? Well. There was Kirk Donnelly, my English Composition 101 professor, who had us bring in advertisements from magazines to show how pictures can do the job better than words; assigned us papers (“Describe a Room” … “Use a Paradox” … “Write a One-page Conversation”), which he collected and never handed back; and liked to talk for whole periods about his two-year career as a technical writer, producing manuals for the home repair of a brand of car I can’t remember. On the other extreme was Phillip Henry, a Rhodes scholar who taught us philosophy by posing formerly unthought of questions, about the im materiality of the material world, the subjectivity of truth, and the circuity of time, which got me thinking so hard I felt brain cells growing.

Then there were my fellow students. There was one about my age, who, when asked to please read the essay assigned in English, picked up a blank piece of paper and pretended to be reading something she never wrote. I was sitting next to her when she did it, and seeing her actually pretend to read a blank page, for a good three minutes, threw me into a fit of laughing I couldn’t stop. Mr. Donnelly smiled good-humoredly when she finished and said, “Maybe you’ll share the joke, Bev?”

The woman shot me a dirty look.

I couldn’t share the joke, because I didn’t know myself what I found so paralyzingly funny. Except maybe it had brought to mind the ridiculous book reports I used to make up in high school. But making up book reports was nothing compared to this woman’s performance, which was pure virtuosity. This was what you’d call unfulfilled potential. I admired her at the same time I thought she was a fool for not doing her assignments. Why come if you didn’t want to work?

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.

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.