When put in a situation that required her to put her needs aside for another person’s, it did not compute. Her circuitry overloaded and she shut down. Her insatiable need to protect herself was not going to change, no matter how many times I hoped otherwise.
I did not say any of this. I smiled and told her it was a great idea for me to start buying my own food.
Then I left the house and returned to my grandparents’ home, where I didn’t have to pay for the right to exist.
By the time I became a junior, Granny had signed on as a volunteer in the high school career center, so she could get her hands on every college scholarship that came in and steer it my way before the other students had a chance to apply.
“It’s not cheating, it’s just being smart,” she said. “Besides, you need the money more than those rich kids.”
Mom didn’t get involved in Granny’s drive to get me to college, and while I was thankful someone was helping me, my grandmother’s eagerness to plan this next step sometimes felt like it veered into a desire to get me out of her house. She gave me nearly weekly reminders that I had to bring home A’s, because there was no way we could afford college unless I got a full scholarship. When my birthday came, she bought me luggage. She selected a handful of Bay Area colleges for me to apply to, corrected the grammar in my college essays and called the schools to check the status of my applications.
Our mailbox started filling up with college brochures, but the most persistent recruiter was Mills College, a private women’s liberal arts school in Oakland. I didn’t consider applying because it sounded like something out of Pride and Prejudice, but Granny announced she had signed us up for a tour.
We entered the campus through an impressive wrought-iron gate on a drive that took us through a row of ancient eucalyptus trees. We passed manicured lawns, and dorms built in the Spanish Colonial Revival style with stucco walls, terra-cotta tiled roofs, and balconies. The campus had bubbling fountains and a creek, an enormous library, and I learned Mills had chefs who prepare three meals a day for students, even baking the bread for toast. It looked more like a spa than a college.
But what impressed me the most was the students. I met a violinist, a rower, a ground squirrel researcher, a computer programmer and a fashion model—all in one day. They majored in mystifying things such as Political, Legal and Economic Analysis, or Sound Theory. These were women who didn’t feel sorry for themselves, and I wanted to be near them so that I might absorb some of their confidence. By the time we left, I no longer cared that Mills was a single-sex campus. It was my first choice. They had an early-admission program, and I could apply immediately.
A few months after our visit, a student worker from the principal’s office came into one of my classes and passed a note to my geometry teacher. He halted in the middle of his chalk equation and looked right at me.
“Meredith, can you come here, please?”
I went to the teacher’s desk and opened the pink square of paper. “Call your granny,” it read. I used a dime in the pay phone near the front steps of campus. Granny was out of breath when she picked up on the first ring.
“You got it!” she managed.
“Got what?”
“Mills sent you an acceptance letter. You got in!”
I opened my mouth, but no sound came out. My knees felt weak, and I gripped the edge of the metal box surrounding the pay phone to steady myself as colors melted and blurred around me. I could hear Granny catching her breath on the other end of the line. It was a win-win, signaling the beginning of Granny getting her life back and the start of mine.
“We did it!” she cheered.
Then I remembered the price tag. Thirteen thousand a year. Private school tuition wasn’t part of our family’s vocabulary.
“But we can’t afford it,” I said.
“Don’t worry, you are getting financial aid. We only have to come up with three thousand. Your grandfather and I will pay half, you and your mother can pay two hundred and fifty each, and you’ll have to call your father to get the last thousand.”
Granny had obviously been putting some thought into this. By patching together grants and loans from