An Uncommon Education (16 page)

“Naomi Feinstein,” I said. “From down the street,” my father, now at the door, concluded for me. He chuckled at his own joke, taking in the scene before him as he stood in the doorway. “Solomon Feinstein,” he said, taking a step into the room toward Amy’s father, who looked embarrassed, as he had since Amy had reprimanded him earlier. “Sol,” my dad said, holding out his hand. “And this is my wife, Theresa.”

“John Wade,” he said, shaking my father’s hand before grimacing a smile at my mother. “Feinstein. Is that a Jewish name?”

Amy elbowed him. “It’s no big
deal
, Dad. All the good schools are multicultural now.” He nodded, chastised, and returned to the task of stacking books.

“My mom’s back home,” Amy explained, studying mine. “She works fifteen-hour days, just couldn’t make it. She’s senior vice president at Procter and Gamble.”

My mother paused before responding, as if trying to assess if she should act impressed by this information, something I guessed she would have done on my behalf. She looked over at me. I gave her no indication of my own reaction and she seemed relieved by this. She was trying, I could tell, to make me feel at ease, to let me set the tone for the day. “That’s nice,” she said to Amy. “That must make you proud,” she added.

And then to me, “Do you want me to make up your bed for you?” She checked herself. “I mean, why don’t I just leave your bed stuff there and your dad and I can bring the box home.” She turned to Mr. Wade. “Do you have boxes you’d like us to take away for you?”

“Hey, that’d be great,” Amy said. “We already started a pile in the hall. I don’t know how they’re going to get all this stuff out of here.” My mother had moved over to my father. Her hand was resting lightly on his arm. “I think we should probably let the girls get settled,” she said to him.

He looked up with the expression of someone who had expected to stay much longer. “She’ll need help,” he said, his voice rising. He looked over at me. “You need help, Naomi, right? Here”—he opened my own box of books—“let me put
Gray’s
on the shelf for you, at least. You’ll want it in easy reach.” He turned to John Wade, who’d studiously ignored us after our formal greeting. “Naomi’s going to be a doctor,” he announced. “It’s okay, Dad,” I said, watching him. “I’ll be fine, I can unpack once you’ve left. The weather’s bad and you should get back before it gets dark.” I was watching his face fall as I said all this. “Here, I’ll walk you out.” “It’s not too bad,” he said dejectedly. He shoved one hand, fisted, into the pocket of his cardigan. It was an ancient sweater, grayish blue, with large faux-bronze buttons. “Well, I’ll still walk you downstairs,” I said.

“You’ll have to,” Amy’s father said solemnly. “They have rules about that here.”

“Oh, Dad, not during initiation weekend, with all the dads around,” Amy sang. Just then, a tall, muscular boy walked by our door carrying a full cardboard box. “Or brothers, or whatever”—a significant grin in my direction. “They have rules about fathers?” my father asked.

“No men over the age of twelve past the front desk without an escort,”
Amy recited from memory a section in the back of the Wellesley Guidebook we’d received a month earlier.
“No men over the age of twelve in the halls without a Wellesley student as escort. No male guests allowed to travel vertically between floors without a Wellesley student as escort.”
She looked up. “Mind like a steel trap,” she said, tapping her temple. The gesture looked like it felt awkward even to her.

None of us said anything. Her father, in particular, was studiously occupied with the bookcase, surveying his work. Amy kneeled before the box of books he had opened, reached for the few books that remained, and leaned over him, disrupting, then rearranging what he had done.

“Let’s go, Dad,” I said, taking my father’s arm. My mother’s hand was now resting on his other shoulder.

“Do we have your phone number yet?” he asked as we walked out the door. “I probably won’t have a phone for a few days,” I replied. The hall was crowded with arriving students and I was eager to have us moving. I felt vulnerable standing still in the stream, but also fiercely protective; they were mine, not to be scrutinized by strangers whose nerves might encourage them to judge others too critically: my father as grossly tender, my mother as too stiff.

“It’s going to be fine, Dad,” I said after we’d made our way silently down the corridors and back to the front door. There was a brief break in the constant human traffic we’d been navigating. It seemed, suddenly, that there would be no way to say a real goodbye. “I love you,” I told him, giving him a firm hug which I hoped conveyed much more. “I’ll call you when I get a phone.” I hugged him again, taking in the damp wool smell of his old sweater. “Love you, Mom,” I hugged her tightly as well. She smiled at me, the overhead light making her pale skin look thin. I shifted slightly so I could see her expression better. My father’s face was pulled into a weighty scowl. Maybe they thought of it too, sometimes, that we were all we had.

My father hugged me once more, then followed after her quickly. He is a man who has never understood goodbye; he is still baffled by the idea that I now live in my own home, that I have had experiences that are foreign to him. I watched from the window by the door as they retreated down the hilled driveway, their focus on not slipping as they walked, my mother thinner from behind than I remembered, my father’s shirt underneath his cardigan untucked in the back. It felt awful and exhilarating to watch them leave.

T
he first week at Wellesley was chaotic and lonely, and once the upperclasswomen joined us there seemed to be even more cause for loneliness—they settled into the regal, perfectly groomed campus in a myriad of ways, so many of them poised with a private business and confidence far beyond my reach. I looked around me, realizing that outside of Adams High School and Anna Kim’s domain, the world of my peers might be changing for me. But as I looked, I caught no one looking back at me.

It seemed that hasty, desperate friendships were all that was available to the first-years who were more socially ambitious; the women who bonded immediately operated in a realm that was both frightening and inhospitable. They were aggressively, almost hilariously, enraptured, and they were in the minority. Amy and I quickly joined forces once we realized that neither one of us was quick to make friends, though it wasn’t a bond based on mutual liking. We simply established an unspoken agreement to help each other survive. We tried to meet each other for lunch and dinner in the dining hall, but when we couldn’t I pretended that I was in a rush and had somewhere to go. I ate too quickly, my insecurity developing into a literal lump in my stomach.

After Amy and I turned out our lights at night, I stared at the blank wall above me, noticing the sinking sensation I had, the feeling that not only had my loneliness followed me to Wellesley, it was threatening to grow there. I’m not sure exactly what I had expected would be different at that point, but the growing hollowness within me kept me from sleeping. I missed my parents, but my calls home were awkward and unsatisfying. My mother said hello and got off the phone, at which point my father got on and I hinted that I’d like to know how she was doing. She was always “just fine.” I knew this wasn’t true, but I also had to have faith that my father would tell me otherwise if I needed to know. I couldn’t bear to go home and see her, for fear I wouldn’t leave, so I invited my father to campus for lunches on the weekend. At first he came, then he noticed I was eating alone and greeting no one, and decided, as he said, “to give me my space. You can’t make friends with your father around all the time.”

So we depended on the phone, but we were not used to being apart, or having exchanges that involved only each other’s voices. His advice became canned, overly optimistic. He told me that I just needed to meet the other Jewish girls, to try the Hillel on campus. Despite the fact that we had become practically nonobservant as I’d grown increasingly competitive and obsessed with schoolwork, he still liked to pretend that when I was done with school and the like, happily ensconced in a home across the street from him, we’d once again observe leisurely Shabbats and the High Holidays together. I loved and hated him for this.

Still, I had no ideas of my own, so I tried his on for size. The Hillel was lean and serviced by chaste, confidently Jewish women. I scanned the crowd there, wondering if anyone else might share a chronically depressed mother from an Irish Catholic upbringing or a father who was an orphaned sabra. Not that I would have been likely to discuss such things.

There was one woman from Newton (the town neighboring Brookline, both geographically and culturally) who was delighted to meet me; but she was as unaffected and warm in her headscarf and long skirt as I was suspicious and insecure in my stiff dress. It was as foreign to me as I imagined a church social would be. I felt lonesome, mostly within myself, as I often did in Jewish communities, feeling the tug of recognition, the sorrowful comfort of the songs I’d heard first from my father, the sense that I was not as perfectly suited to this mold as I felt I should have been. Hillel kept me on their mailing list for the next four years, though I spent the same amount of time wondering if I had any right or reason to revisit. Alone at night, I lay awake and thought about how I was betraying my father’s ideals in almost every possible way.

So, as usual, I dove headfirst into my studies, which, oddly enough, began to make me feel that I was in good company. At the library or in common rooms there were always other women on their own, papers surrounding them. These women kept me going, for better or worse. Being in a single-sex community heightened every comparison, every inspiration. Even passing another woman on one of the countless walkways between buildings would rarely result in a greeting or even an acknowledgment. I began to coach myself in adopting the coolness around me, enjoying the strange excitement of an unfriendliness even I hadn’t dared to entertain before. At first if I saw a woman nearing me on a path, I would brace myself for being ignored, but within a few months I began to stiffen my posture and anticipate the exhilaration of such a bald rudeness on both our parts. It was amazing to pass another woman my age, at my college, and pretend we had no reason to acknowledge one another. It was a great, powerful lie, and it was as cold as the winter we were heading into, though sometimes as invigorating. At the library, I took to my own table and never worried that someone would ask to sit with me. Studying was hushed, and the walks home peppered only with more impassive strangers. We were not ships in the night; we were missiles in the day. It was thrilling and unkind.

In the interest of keeping ourselves well-rounded, students were encouraged to join “groups,” many of which seemed interested in defining themselves against the general population or, when in luck, directly against an antithetical group. After the first few weeks, Amy finally convinced me to audition with her for an a cappella group, the Wellesley Symphonettes. I was still ready to believe that I might discover a hidden talent or passion, that maybe this place had yet to reveal something about me I hadn’t yet considered, so I joined her.

Perversely, of the three such groups on campus, the Symphonettes required both a song and a joke. When it came to the joke, I was at a loss, completely forgetting the one Amy had looked up for me earlier in the day. The Symphonettes running the auditions sat in a smiling row, watching me, like an affable firing squad. Had they frowned or cleared their throats or sent me from the room, it would have been far less intimidating than the smiles fixed on their faces.

“Did you know we require a joke?” Their second-in-command asked softly.

I nodded.

“You see,” the leader asserted herself, “we like to be enter-
tain
-ing. A good performance is about more than just musicality, you see. The audience wants to have a good time.” The lipstick she wore was the type I had never tried to wear, sure it would smear across my teeth. Hers was lined into submission, a frame of red around the perfect white of her smile, like the careful painting of a professional clown.

D
uring the spring semester, I had a lecture at 8:15 and had to force myself to eat in the dining hall before leaving for class, trying to lift my head from the sand and find the friendships I felt might exist there, just beyond my grasp. On the first of one of these days I worked up the courage to sit at a table with two other women, both of whom were upperclasswomen I didn’t know; I had memorized most of the faces in my dorm, but I couldn’t place these two girls: one, tall with red hair, the other, of medium height with nearly black hair and a tiny, pear-shaped nose. They were frank but unintimidating, and the redhead, who introduced herself as Heather and her seatmate as Beth, was an English major eager to tell the most infamous stories about the professors in that department.

Just as Heather was getting warmed up, a woman walked past our table holding a paper above her head. She headed to a table across the room, but seemed to leave a ripple of something behind her, something that made the three of us, as well as several others, watch her. Within a few minutes, the ripple had made its way back to our side of the room. Jennifer Seton, a wealthy and glossy blonde in the senior class, appeared out of nowhere and took a seat at our table.

“Sarah Stroeber just got accepted to Yale Law. She’s number two in our class this year—Mira got her letter this weekend. That means Ann Graber’s out.” She held a comfortable command over her audience.

“Morning, Jen”—Beth spoke first; she stabbed a piece of melon as she did. “Ann could still get in.”

Jen cocked her head, deeply amused. I think she’d wanted this reaction. “They take two from Wellesley every year.”

“Nineteen eighty-eight,” Beth replied. “Four.”

“Nineteen eighty, only one,” Jen replied.

“It’s not a fucking pattern equation, Jen”—she pushed her hair over her shoulder—“it’s Yale Law. They do what they want.”