and this was her answer to it: what she would give me in preparation for Harvard.
“I won’t be cleaning toilets where I’m going,” I said.
“Maybe not,” she said. “But you will someday.” She was right.
Coda
If you still desire a thing, its time has not yet come. And when you have what you desired, you will have no more desire, instead you will have time. Weak desires protect you from disappointment. But nothing keeps you safer than being a visible ruin.
—Fanny Howe, Indivisible
I arrived at Harvard alone the week before school started to join the First-Year Outdoor Program. It was hot and humid. I waited in the registration line under a white tent, but when I got to the front and said my name, a woman pulled me aside to say my tuition had not been paid. She seemed skeptical of my right to be there. I told her there must be a mistake, but I was embarrassed, and felt exceptionally alone. My dorm assignment and registration packet were delayed. I found a pay phone and called Jeff Howson, my father’s accountant, who said he would do his best to set it right. The following week, when I returned from camping, my tuition had been paid, and I was given a dorm assignment.
In the first three months of my freshman year, before my father stopped responding to my calls and emails, I complained to him on the phone about how I couldn’t see since I’d arrived in Boston. Everything was flat and close; there were no vistas; my eyes ached; the buildings were smashed up against the sightlines. “All I see is the building in front of me, everywhere I go.”
“It’s a metaphor for the East Coast mind,” he’d said.
When fall arrived, I was cold in my new coat. I’d brought only a few pairs of cotton socks. I did not yet understand the importance of wool.
I worried about my mother. How would she afford to pay the rent?
“I’ll figure something out,” she said when I asked. “You don’t need to worry about me. I always make things work.”
She would be the one I’d call for hours every night during my first year in college, for her insights and care, when I found a culture far more alien than I had expected, and after I experienced my first heartbreak when Josh and I broke up, for which neither a fancy coat nor a skill at cleaning toilets had prepared me.
I was floored by grief.
About heartbreak my parents gave, separately, the same advice: “You’ve got to feel all your feelings. That way, next time, when you fall in love again, it will be just as meaningful and profound.”
“The first heartbreak brings up the pain of the past,” my father said. “The first big loss. Harness it.”
“If something is really painful, it’s the undertow of a big, beautiful wave,” my mother said.
Other people said, “Get over it,” and “Go out.”
I took only what interested me: a class on anthropology that was held in the back of a wooden building filled with bones; a film and literature class; a class about the laws protecting children; and an art class in which we had to draw one hand with the other. I joined the paper, the literary magazine, and did community service at a local school.
My father came to visit me once that year. Walking behind me up the stairs to my dorm, he’d said, “You need to lose some weight.” He told my new suitemate that her artificially flavored microwave popcorn was “shit.” Despite his temper, he’d had an air of melancholy, even offering to buy me a leather jacket at a nice clothing shop called Agnès B. I refused because it seemed too expensive, it seemed weighty, as if it really meant something else but I didn’t understand what, or what to say to him, being sad myself, lonely again without his company in this strange place I was supposed to like.
That summer, when I returned, my father treated me strangely, not talking with me unless he snapped at me with contempt. I was too thin. Laurene told her friend I was anorexic. I wanted to eat, but store-bought food tasted like cardboard, and I didn’t know how to cook. Laurene kept buying me sandwiches.
When I went to see Dr. Lake, I discovered my father had decided not to pay the bill anymore. Dr. Lake said, “No one has the right to refuse you medical care,” and reduced his fee to twenty-five dollars