In my senior year I applied--more or less in secret--to three colleges. I had no idea what I was getting myself into when I filled out those applications in the early winter of 1974, answering the essays questions in peacock blue ink from a plastic cartridge pen, clueless that I should have been using a typewriter.
Not that we owned a typewriter.
Later that year, my father drove me up to Hanover, New Hampshire, in a 1967 silver gray Buick Skylark. Recently widowed, my 53-year-old dad had no idea what this experience would be like for his only daughter and offered few comments on the drive up I-91. He asked me, simply, "What's the worse that can happen?"
What did happen? Nothing dreadful, only I was excruciatingly conscious of the fact that I spoke funny, dressed funny, acted funny, and didn't fit in. Let's put it this way: I most certainly didn't have what F. Scott Fitzgerald would have described as "a voice full of money." When I put on a Laura Ashley peasant dress, I didn't look like a sweet little English lady; I looked like the girl on the front of a can of Contadina tomato sauce.
On a number of other levels, however--and maybe you have to remember what it was like to be 18 and out of your league to really understand this--it was genuinely terrifying. I always worried that the money I made at my work-study jobs was not going to be enough to get me through to the end of the term, and I didn't want to be a parasite. I sold my books back when I really wanted to keep them. I worried about being broke, about asking my father for cash, about the enormous number of loans I was taking out, about small debts to friends. In the middle of some anxious nights, I wondered how I became a foster-child of this affluent institution.
My father and brother would drive up from Brooklyn once a term to visit me. Other folks' families came up and stayed for parent's weekend or homecoming. My family would drive back late the same night because it would never have occurred to any of us that they spend money on a room and stay for longer. My brother would study the leggy, graceful girls, sleek as thoroughbreds, and comment on the disparity between them and my friends back home. I'd laugh along, chiding him, but I knew what he meant because the burnished, blue-eyed boys walking around campus looked pretty different from what I'd experienced back home, too.
What remained entirely out of my reach was the polished look that comes from being a kid from a family with a solid financial and social foundation. We're not just talking good genes here, we're talking about something more complex, often referred to as breeding, a combination of inherited gifts and nurtured talents. As hard as it is to define, it is nevertheless essential to understand: people--not necessarily the irrefutably rich, but the socially and culturally privileged--have a distinct way of handling the world, as if they are simply overseeing what belongs to them.
I didn't have this and I couldn't fake it. But I had good grades and the stuff it took to get good grades. I had a bravado that often was mistaken for strength. I had a big mouth that was sometimes interpreted as self-confidence. And while I substituted swagger for poise and unashamedly used my sense of humor as a way to camouflage my almost perpetual discomfort, I couldn't fool myself or anyone else into thinking that Dartmouth was the kind of place that would have always let me in the front door. True, Dartmouth took "charity" students from the very beginning, and I have since learned that it was typical for students in the 19th century to work during the winter to earn enough money for spring term studies.But I think I was confronting something slightly different--not worse, but different--from what those earlier students had faced.
Thirty years before my admission, half French-Canadian girls could never have been expected to do anything in Hanover but wash floors in the middle of the night and disappear, inaudible and imperceptible, before the owners of the place--the students--woke up. Half-Italian girls might have worked in kitchens or bars, or worked in the endlessly gray mill buildings leaning into New England's rivers. Girls like me, not so very long ago, would have lived in boarding houses, not dorms; they would have averted their eyes from college boys for fear of being thought too easy or too bold.
I have become increasingly aware of the way in which my time at college helped me face--and even challenge--my own ambivalence about the larger implications of success. In retrospect, I think that I both exploited and evaded the confines of the role of working-class-kid on campus. True, I saw social and economic spikes everywhere and rushed to impale myself on them.
But also, in time, I came to accept that the education and experience were mine--not just things that had been lent to me, like somebody's earrings or their car, to be returned undamaged and unsoiled at a later date.
Finally, I believe that a good education is always subversive, even when it ostensibly endorses conventional moral and cultural doctrines, and so I know that only a very good education could have prepared me to be a truly effective troublemaker and, in the end, I am indeed grateful.
---
adapted from Babes in Boyland: A Personal History of Coeducation in the Ivy League, now in paperback
