Hard to Change

Thinking about my freshman year brings back a flood of memories, unfortunately mostly wave after wave of despairing ones. I found myself at Simmons College because I had messed up the college admissions process due to, as I now see it, a bad depression. (This is nothing against Simmons, a fine school, and I'm grateful that they accepted me.) J had left for Alaska. There was a vague understanding that we were engaged to be married, but of course that turned out not to be the case, and it felt slippery and vague even at the time. I might have spent college in Fairbanks, a place I couldn’t imagine myself in as much as I wanted to be with him. The whole thing between us fell apart when he came home for Christmas. After the paradise of my junior year of high school, my senior year was disastrous for me. J was gone. I was heartbroken. My parents were pitiless. My best girlfriend also was gone, abroad as an AFS student. J’s mother, for some reason – perhaps out of loneliness herself - invited me to come live with her that fall. I gladly accepted. It was an escape from the hellhole of the house I grew up in, one bathroom to six people. I shared a room with my sister, who was seven years younger than me. We were all scorpions in a bottle in that house. To this day few of the remaining of us who are alive are even on speaking terms. It really was a hell. So yes, gladly I accepted F’s invitation to live with her. She was gay and exuberant, a wonderful cook, she loved a nightly fire in the hearth, a glass of Gallo burgundy, readings from humorous books and poetry, etc., etc. I moved in with her and now took the bus to school along with the wealthy North Stamford set. J’s brother came home from college on weekends. We got along, too well. We were all of us very lonely. The terms had shifted. That fall I put on weight and started smoking. F gave English lessons to a German who left his cigarettes on the mantel. I experimented. In her living room I would stay up late drinking red wine, smoking, and watching Janus films on PBS. The room would be smoky the next morning. I was depressed, and F’s mood towards me soured, unsurprisingly. Also, she did not approve of this vague engagement between me and her son. Things were very confusing that year. Anyway, she asked me to leave, and I did, and my parents reluctantly accepted me back, they didn’t have a choice. I should have been devoting my fall to researching and applying to colleges but things had fallen completely apart and I had no help or support. The whole fall I was living with F I hardly saw either of my parents at all. I would never have expected anything from my father, we had been at war since I was a toddler when he pinched my arm very hard when I in my joyful play woke him one Sunday morning. But I expected more from my mother. To this day I do not forgive her. But that’s another story.

So that spring I went to school during the day, worked some afternoons at the library, did my homework, took long bike rides, and otherwise took to bed, crying and sleeping too much. (Actually the fall at F’s was much like that too. F was nice, to a point, but she wasn’t much of an empath. Well, she wasn’t my mother – I couldn’t expect maternal support from her. Besides, she was J’s mother.)

Anyway. So I was back at home and it was midspring my senior year and I still hadn’t applied anywhere to school that fall. The mail was always full of glossy brochures and packets, and Simmons College sent an attractive one with the sights of Boston, a city I had set foot in only once before in my life, on a school daytrip to the Freedom Trail. (To this day I can remember that early morning, the coach bus barreling down the vast fogbound Rhode Island turnpike, the happiness I felt that moment, timeless, weightless, transported.)

I applied to Simmons, was accepted, received financial aid. That summer I lived as an au pair with a family in Riverside, Greenwich, taking caring of their five-year old autistic daughter. That’s another story too. I didn’t last the summer. I was depressed and on my own with this beautiful, mute child, and my heart was broken for J and I had no one. The parents of the girl shorted me a week’s pay, $75. Or perhaps that was the cost of the frozen Bloomingdale’s cookies I ate out of her freezer one night that summer. So maybe we’re even.

So once again, humorlessly, my parents accepted me back, this time for just a few days or weeks before I was set to go to school. Neither of my parents accompanied me to Boston. Instead, they dispatched my two younger brothers to escort me on Amtrak. We spent the night in a motel, the following morning my brothers and I found Simmons, they dropped me off, and that was that. My mother had bought me a comforter (what I soon discovered was in Boston called a “puff”). It had a very strong design, vaguely Indian, black elephants on a red and gold field. A loud pattern. My roommate, a very preppy girl from Marblehead who had a strong conception of how our shared room should look, hated it on sight, and that was the start of our mismatched year together.

And all these things feel so hard to change….

Later. I was actually trying to get to a small memory from all this preamble.