One student warns me that there is a protest planned outside my lecture tonight, though she can’t seem to explain exactly what it’s about. It reminds me of the time I joined a student walkout, got up and left history class, hoping all the way that someone would tell me where we were going and why.
That night, on the stage of Finney Chapel, I feel adrenalized and inchoate, like I have something to prove and no drive to do it. I’ve braided my hair and I can feel it sliding, slowly but surely, down my neck in wet clumps. A favorite professor asks me thoughtful questions, and I answer as best I can, with sound bites that have worked in the past.
“I feel like I have to bring up some of the controversy surrounding your work,” he says.
“Okay, bring it up!” I’m trying to speak from a place of calm and strength, but it comes out more like a shriek. “Bring it up, and tell those protesters to come in, and we will talk like adults, not just freaks with signs! We will talk to each other and just WORK IT OUT! Because at the end of the day, we’re all pissed about the same thing, you know? Having to be in school.”
He looks at me blankly. The audience shifts, with discomfort or confusion or both. In an instant it becomes clear to me that there are no protesters, probably never were. If they planned something, they all bailed. There’s just me, them. Us.
The next morning I leave at 8:00 A.M. Driving through town in the snow, I see my memories plainly. There I am in my long sleeping-bag coat, shuffling to class twenty minutes late on a Tuesday morning. There I am in what used to be the video store, piling my arms high with VHSs. There I am in the diner, ordering not one but two egg sandwiches. There I am in the gym, riding an Exercycle from the early ’80s and reading a book called Bosnian Rape.
And there I am, drunk on a spring night, yanking my tampon out and hurling it into a bush outside the church. There I am falling in love by the bike rack. There I am slowly realizing my bike has gone missing from that same rack, stolen while I was sleeping. There I am calling my father from the steps of the art museum. There I am half listening to a professor when she tells me I need to start attending class more regularly. And I’m there, too, dragging a torn sofa into the black-box theater with my “set designer.”
If I had known how much I would miss these sensations I might have experienced them differently, recognized their shabby glamour, respected the ticking clock that defined this entire experience. I would have put aside my resentment, dropped my defenses. I might have a basic understanding of European history or economics. More abstractly, I might feel I had truly been somewhere, open and porous and hungry to learn. Because being a student was an enviable identity and one I can only reclaim by attending community college late in life for a bookmaking class or something.
I’ve always had a talent for recognizing when I am in a moment worth being nostalgic for. When I was little, my mother would come home from a party, her hair cool from the wind, her perfume almost gone, and her lips a faded red, and she would coo at me: “You’re still awake! Hiiii.” And I’d think how beautiful she was and how I always wanted to remember her stepping out of the elevator in her pea-green wool coat, thirty-nine years old, just like that. Sixteen, lying on the dock at night with my camp boyfriend, taking tiny sips from a bottle of vodka. But school was so essentially repulsive to me, so characterized by a desire to be done. That’s part of why it hurts so bad to see it again.
I didn’t drink in the essence of the classroom. I didn’t take legible notes or dance all night. I thought I would marry my boyfriend and grow old and sick of him. I thought I would keep my friends, and we’d make different, new memories. None of that happened. Better things happened. Then why am I so sad?
I remember when my schedule was as flexible as she is.
—DRAKE
I WORKED AT THE BABY STORE for nine months.
Just recently graduated, I had stormed out of my restaurant job on a whim, causing my father to yell, “You can’t just do that! What if you had children?”
“Well, thank God I don’t!” I yelled right back.
At this point, I was living in a glorified closet at the back of my parents’ loft, a room they had assigned me because they thought I would graduate and move out like a properly evolving person. The room had no windows, and so, in order to get a glimpse of daylight, I had to slide open the door to my sister’s bright, airy room. “Go away,” she would hiss.