My parents have authority problems. In second grade, my mother was sent home from school for trying to organize a protest in which every girl defied the dress code and wore pants. She found her teachers not only boring but repulsive, especially the ones who were trying to embrace the counterculture. They couldn’t trick her with their long center-parted hair, their amber beads, their use of the word “vibe.” Even now, a part-time teacher herself, she is horrified by the idea of anyone telling her what to think or do. She is also opposed to socializing with her students, mortified that anyone would think she was pulling the “cool teacher” move. “There is nothing more disgusting than being the oldest lady at the party,” she likes to say.
My father, meanwhile, began his academic career as the shining star of the Southbury, Connecticut, public school system. Class president, book-club leader, smiling bucktoothed in a necktie on the Student of the Month placard. But like all the men in his family, he was eventually shipped off to boarding school, and by the time he got to Andover he was fifteen, shaggy haired, and angry, refusing to attend chapel or even class. When I read Catcher in the Rye it was instantly familiar, like an extension of the stories my father would tell on a long car ride. My father’s journey from emblem of academic excellence to deadbeat burnout was a classic narrative but a potent one. I felt pride imagining the moment he realized it was all bullshit, man, and at his bravery for refusing to be carried along with the current. One time he cut class and walked into the woods and out onto the surface of an icy pond, only to fall through into the freezing water. After a terrifying struggle, he caught hold of the ice and pulled himself out and ran, soaking, back to the safety of his dormitory. But his life had flashed before his eyes. He could have died. After all, nobody knew where he was.
I went through brief phases of being a good student. Showing up early to my seminar with a mug of tea, taking cogent notes with a mechanical pencil, carrying my books close to my chest like a girl in a movie about Radcliffe. I loved doing it right—the ease of it, the tidiness of my objectives, which were simply to understand and express that understanding.
But inevitably it faded. A month into the semester, I would start showing up twenty minutes late to class again, with a bag of Cheez Doodles and a cup of cold grits, having left my notebook at home. The rewards weren’t enough to keep me on task, and life got in the way. My mind wandered to the future, postcollege, when I’d create my own schedule that served my need to eat a rich snack every five to fifteen minutes. As for the disappointment written across the teacher’s face? I couldn’t, and wouldn’t, care.
I was fifteen minutes late to graduation. My mother forgot the peach silk dress I planned to wear, and so I bought a vintage sari and piled my hair atop my head and trooped out to the arch in the middle of Tappan Square and waited for the music to start. My boyfriend, already graduated, lay out on the lawn. My father wondered why he had worn a suit. We were given two options: walk around the Tappan Square arch if you don’t support the imperialist missionaries who installed it or walk through it if you don’t know, don’t care. I can’t remember which option I chose, only that I couldn’t believe I had never noticed the pregnant oboist in line in front of me. As we strode onto the lawn, I nodded at the teachers, dressed to the nines in their Hogwarts garb for the tenth, thirtieth, fiftieth year in a row. Later, motherfuckers.
I go back to Oberlin in the dead of winter to give a “convocation speech” in Finney Chapel, the largest and most historic of campus structures. In a subconscious nod to my college experience I forget to pack both tights and underwear and have to spend the weekend going commando in a wool skirt and kneesocks. I am toured around the school like I’m a stranger by a girl who didn’t even go here. We stop at a glossy new café for tea and scones. She asks if I want a tour of the dormitories—no, I just want to wander around alone and maybe cry.
That it’s been six years since I graduated from college seems impossible. Older folks laugh at my na?veté, saying that six years is nothing in the scheme of life. But now I’ve been gone longer than I was there. Soon, my life as a student will be as far behind me as summer camp.
I head down to the basement of Burton Hall where they’ve assembled a question-and-answer session, with student journalists sitting in a messy half circle around me. I make sure to keep my legs crossed, so as to avoid the headline: “Returning Alumna Flashes Vagina.” Most of them ask sweet, neutral questions: “What do you think is the most beautiful spot in Oberlin?” “If you could take one class again, which would it be?” Others have a sharper edge and seem to be looking for the big scoop: “How does it feel to be a line item in so many people’s narratives of privilege and oppression?”
I don’t have a good answer. I look around for a sympathetic face before muttering, “There are some worse guys than me.”