If Only There Was A Word Called Adulting - Ch 3 Pt 2

December 1995, Grosse Pointe, Michigan

Mrs. Churchill told me to have them send the packet to home instead of SEM, ‘cause early decision letters are mailed during winter break so kids can celebrate with their families, and she didn’t want me to miss mine. To my extreme surprise, one day our maid brings this fat envelope up to my room and hands it over to me, saying, “Package for you, Miss Anne”. It’s from MIT, and I realize that, contrary to all my expectations, I’ve gotten in. How on earth that happened, when Elise had to teach me algebra and trigonometry from scratch in ninth grade and I’ve never gotten gold in cross-country and nobody in this world really cares if you’re a debutante, is completely beyond me. But when I open the envelope and pull out the letter, there are handwritten, signed notes from three different people on the admissions committee at the top of it; they all said they loved my essay, and one of them, a lady, said she was proud of the initiative and righteousness I showed and believed that whichever path I choose in the end, I will be a credit to society. Looking at all the stuff they wrote makes me want to cry, because nobody ever thought my dreams were all that important before this, and yet these people, who get to read essays from all the smartest 18-year-olds in the world, thought that what I wrote was worth enough to them to let me in, in fact to even make the effort to write back to me about it.

Dinnertime is the one time when everybody in the house has to assemble together, so that’s naturally the time I choose to break my news. I certainly didn’t expect rampant joy, and would be thankful to escape a massive scolding, so when Father’s reaction is somewhere in the middle, I guess I’ve got to count my blessings.

“So, you won’t be giving Barnard a chance, then?” is the only response I get from Father, his face and voice as impassive as if I’d just asked him to pass the salt.

“I…” I guess I am trapped, because early decision means you can’t say no if you get in, though I never meant it that way and I wasn’t trying to kick out Barnard on purpose. I never really thought I’d get into MIT, so until I got that fat envelope in the mail, I’d believed all along that I’d be applying to Barnard in spring semester. “It’s the rules – I got in, early decision, and now I’ve gotta go. But if I didn’t, I would’ve still applied to Barnard in the spring. Honestly, I would, Father. Word of honour.”

“Anne, dear,” says Grandma, “what made you do that? What was it that made you think Barnard isn’t good enough, for you to apply to MIT early decision?”

“I – Barnard’s a good place,” I stammer. “But it doesn’t have the type of major I want to do. See, I know our family business is all about cars, and I – if I do engineering in college, maybe – maybe then I can come back and help – I’d be doing something useful.”

“That’s a good thought, honey, but you shouldn’t feel that the family’s future is all on you,” counters Grandma. “All three of you girls are very dear to me, and Anne, you most of all. Surely you know that. We’ve only ever wanted to give you a good life with no worries, and that means you should feel free to study something you truly enjoy, in a place where you can be safe, because you’ll be with other daughters of the top families in this country. You won’t have to worry about helping out and being useful, because you’ll find good men to marry, and that’ll mean you’ll always be well taken care of. We’ve worked so hard, all the generations that built up ELMSCO, because we want you young people to enjoy the privilege of being carefree.”

“But – engineering’s what I really like to do. And if I like it and it’s also useful, isn’t that a good thing?” I push on, hoping they’ll see my point.

“Anne, it’s no use,” cuts in Liz. “No matter how much boy stuff you do, it can’t turn you into a boy for real. And if you were really a boy instead of a girl, then Mom would still be here. But now there’s nothing you or I can do – Mom’s already gone and trying to be a boy won’t bring her back.” She bursts into tears and runs off to her room.

“Father – please excuse me, I guess I gotta go check on her,” I say hurriedly, then dash after Liz to her room. It’s all dark in there, except for the tiny patch of moonlight shining in from the window. She’s flopped on her bed face down, still crying with her face buried in the pillows, and I scootch in next to her lying cautiously on my side.

“Liz,” I tentatively put one hand on her shoulder. “Liz, I’m here. And I’m sorry if I upset you. But why did you say Mom would still be here if I was a boy? Please tell me, I really wanna know.”

Liz turns over and peers at me sideways; I can barely make out her red-rimmed eyes in the faint light. “Do you remember the night Mom died? Well, I guess you don’t, you were only four, but I do. I miss her.”

“I miss her, too,” I tell her. “Kinda. I know she painted the sky in my room, ‘cause Grandma told me. And if I try to remember all the way back, as far as I possibly can, I kinda know there was someone soft and warm who used to hold me, who sang lullabies and wished me sweet dreams. Maybe I don’t know for sure it was Mom, but I’d like to think so.”

“Well, I remember,” replies Liz. “I was six, and Mom was all excited about giving us a little brother. And so she went to the hospital, and Father was there but he wouldn’t let me go with him. You were asleep with your nanny, but I couldn’t sleep so I snuck down to the parlour and hid behind that big Chesterfield sofa to wait up for them. I don’t know what time it was when Father got back, but it was getting really cold down there and I was so tired, I almost fell asleep. But when he came back and Grandma opened the door, he – he was crying. And you know Father never cries. I didn’t really understand all the stuff they said, but I knew enough – he said, ‘She’s gone’, and ‘It’s a girl’, and ‘I wish we hadn’t decided to do this’. And Grandma was crying too, and she said she wished too that they hadn’t decided to do it, but they had done their best and maybe this was God’s will. And then we all had to dress in black, and Mom never came back. Mary almost died too, when she was a little baby she stayed in the hospital for a long time, and sometimes they took me to see her, and she was this tiny little red thing in a plastic box with all kinds of tubes sticking out of her. It was really scary, I thought Mary might die just like the way Mom did, and I always wondered if Father and Grandma would’ve thought it was all worthwhile if Mary had been a boy. And if we – if you or me, just one of us was a boy – then they wouldn’t have needed to try, and Mom would’ve still been here with us. But there’s nothing you can do, and nothing I can do neither – I’m stuck being a girl, so all I can do is to be Father’s best girl and be just like him.”

“Oh, Liz,” I scootch in a little nearer and wrap her in my arms. “I never knew, I had no idea. And I wish Mom could be here too. But it isn’t Mary’s fault she’s a girl, and we can’t help it either if we were all born girls. And maybe we can ask Grandma about it tomorrow, so we know what exactly happened for real. But I swear, honest – I’m not doing this engineering stuff to be like a boy, and I don’t wanna hurt anyone in our family, I wanna help make things better. I really do, honest.”

We end up crying ourselves to sleep in Liz’s room that night, and Grandma comes by to check in on us in the morning. “Girls,” she says, drawing the purple Austrian blinds all the way up to the top, “it’s getting late, you should get up and eat something. Do you want to talk to me about what’s upsetting you? Come along, go brush your teeth and then we’ll get some breakfast.”

“Grandma, is it our fault Mom died?” I ask over the fluffy hotcakes and maple syrup the kitchen prepared for us; Grandma probably told them to feed us up to make up for the dinner we missed last night. “Y’know, we all were so young we don’t remember much, but Liz heard Father say, way back then – he said, he wished they hadn’t tried ‘cause Mary turned out to be a girl?”

“Oh, honey,” sooths Grandma. “You shouldn’t ever think any of this was ever your fault, you poor dears. Back when Mary was born, this was 1982 – the ultrasound wasn’t as clever as it is these days, and many times they couldn’t tell if a baby was a boy or a girl, especially if they were all scrunched up or facing the wrong way. Your father and your mom, they always wanted a boy, but they also loved all of you girls, yes, your father loves you in his own way, even though he doesn’t know how to show it. You’re his flesh and blood, after all. But he’s always wanted a son and heir to take on the family business, because ELMSCO is a heavy responsibility, and he’d never want to burden any of you girls with a task that’s only fit for a man’s shoulders. So that’s why they never stopped trying, though your mom had a very difficult time with Mary and her morning sickness was worse that it ever was with either of you. The doctor said it was pre-eclampsia, and they warned us it may come to the point where we’d have to make that choice about whether to save your mom, or the baby. I talked to your mom, my dear Elizabeth, about it many times and she always said she knew she wanted to keep the baby, that she wanted to give it a chance at life. Of course, I was very worried for her, and I wanted her to change her mind, but she said she’d hope for the best. And that’s how she went – she never knew whether she had a boy or a girl, but I promised her I’d make sure you all had nothing but the best, no matter what may happen. And girls, she lives on in both of you – Elizabeth, you’re her namesake, and Anne, you’re the spitting image of her. So, you should both live your lives to your fullest, and that’ll make her so proud of you, because she’s looking down at you from heaven.”

Even though I know Grandma meant well when she said it, the thought of me carrying on Mom’s legacy by being the spitting image of her weighs hard on me. It makes me wonder, what would Mom have done if she was in my shoes, and how could I choose in a way that would honour her memory?

Well, I believe Mom was a person who strongly believed in love, and who fought for what was right. I think she was really brave to make sure Mary had a chance to live, even if it might mean she herself had to die. Grandma also said a lot of times that Mom loved Father very much, and she would’ve done anything she could to make him happy. But then what happens, when the thing that’s right and the thing that makes Father happy are two opposite things? I spend hours sitting at my desk all the rest of winter break, shuffling through the contents of that envelope and re-reading them over and over again, turning over the two choices in my head.

Eventually, on the last day before I go back to SEM, I knock on the door of Father’s study. “Father? Sir?” I say tentatively. “About the college thing – I really wanna do the right thing, and also I wanna do all I can to honour our family traditions. And I think I can do both, by accepting this early decision offer. Early decision is a promise, and I’d be letting our family name down if I backed out ‘cause that won’t be an honourable thing to do. But I can still be a good daughter to you – and make the Elliot family proud of me – if I can learn some useful stuff in college and then come back to help out. I mean, I don’t wanna take over the whole company or anything, just to help out and do something good for the family. Promise, I’ll do everything I can from now on to make you happy and proud.”

Father lifts his head just barely, so I can see his eyes over the People magazine he’s been holding up to read, his bent elbows propped up on the wooden arm rests of his leather desk chair. “As you wish,” he says, blandly and expressionlessly, and then he lowers his gaze, disappearing behind People again. That’s a clear signal that I’ve been dismissed, so I shuffle off to ink in and mail out my acceptance to MIT before I can change my mind.

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January 1996, Buffalo, NY

A new version of Pride and Prejudice comes on air; they released it last year on BBC in the UK, but it took quite a few months before they show it on American TV. They show it for three nights on A&E channel, and Elise and I, together with the rest of our senior year friends and our house mom, watch it in the common room of our student house at SEM. Before this, I haven’t thought about Mr. Darcy for a long time already; by sophomore year, I was so busy with my STEM subjects and the Debutante Ball and cross-country and my summer job at the Musgrove garage that there hasn’t been much time to read fiction books these past two years. And anyway, we’re not twelve anymore; at going on eighteen, none of us are going to admit we’re swooning over pin-ups of Colin Firth publicly, even if that’s what we still do in secret sometimes. So, we’re all kinda like, well, that was nice, but then after that we move on and go right back to our college applications.

I guess part of the reason why Pride and Prejudice isn’t such a big deal anymore is, we’re all big enough not to go for fairy tales, and we all believe we can be the authors of our own destinies, now that college is the only thing anyone in senior year’s thinking about. I kinda feel like it’d be wonderful someday to love somebody and have him love me back, but I know that it’ll probably look more like what Mr. and Mrs. Musgrove are like, rather than like how Mr. Darcy and Elizabeth Bennet were. After all, the fairy tales all end when the prince sweeps the princess away, and nobody tells you about what happens next, in the decades after they marry and live their lives together. I trust that in the future, I’m going to meet lots of boys when I go to college and become a camp counselor and go out to work as an engineer, and someday I’ll find somebody to love, and he doesn’t have to be a prince, just somebody decent and honorable who cares for me and whom I can care for too. Somebody real and ordinary, a person I can actually touch and reach, not a mirage on a pin-up poster. Meanwhile for now, all I need to do is to focus on getting ready for college, so the rest of my life can unfold on its own.

Elise applied in the regular decision cycle for MIT; although she’s way more brilliant than I am, the reason why she didn’t want to apply early decision was because of financial aid. Her dad’s a docent at the Children’s Museum of Science and Technology in Albany where she grew up, so with five sisters in the family and a stay-at-home mom, her family income’s always been at the level where she needed scholarships, and that’s how she got to SEM. She wants to major in electrical and computer engineering, and she’s been tinkering around with circuits and coding ever since she was really little, using all kinds of odds and ends from old computers her dad kept in his garage for her to play with. MIT has these scholarship grants for people like her, which they don’t have to pay back. How nice; Father hasn’t said a thing about MIT since the day I went to his study to tell him I’d accept the early decision offer, and so I have no idea if he’ll agree to pay my tuition or not. Still, it doesn’t hurt to explore my options for financial aid, especially since we have Mrs. Churchill to help us, so I ask her about my options to pay for college on my own.

“Hmm… from what you tell me about your family, you’ll probably be over the limit to qualify for a needs-based grant, so maybe you can look at an unsubsidized loan,” she says. She then walks me through the various loan terms, and explains how interest works, and why it might make sense to take jobs on campus to pay down my interest while I’m still in school.

The paperwork needs me to estimate my family income, so I call Grandma, but she has no idea what it is, and she suggests I could reach out to Mr. Shepherd, our family financial advisor, to get the numbers instead. But she doesn’t know how to send out e-mail, so I have to call Mr. Shepherd’s office and send him the stuff to fill in from school. I don’t hear back from him for the longest time, until after some three weeks or so, Grandma calls me at SEM and tells me that Father has agreed to pay my tuition and fees. I heave a sigh of relief, but I don’t regret learning about how financial aid works and looking into campus jobs, because all of this will be useful practice to make my own way in the world if I need to.

Elise gets her acceptance letter in March, just like I expected all along, and her family drives up to Buffalo in their minivan to take her and me out to celebrate for a weekend. We both can drive now, so her dad rents a Chevy Cavalier for us since we can’t all fit into the van, and we stay overnight at the Niagara Falls. This vacation isn’t at all like the ones we have with Father and Grandma – we eat fast food instead of going to restaurants, and all of us need to squeeze into two motel rooms, so we have to share with her elder sister Jenna and her third sister Marilyn, while her two youngest sisters bunk in with their mom and dad. And her family is loud, lively and boisterous, not restrained like Grandma taught us to be, but they really love each other, and it shows. By the time they drop us both off back at SEM, I wish my family could be a little more like them, too.

It isn’t a big deal to not have a date for prom when you’re in an all-girls school; after all, there’ll be plenty of boys to meet in college, so it feels right to make prom into a night where we celebrate our sisterhood one last time before we fan out to different colleges all over the country. Elise has been designing and making her own dress, using the sewing machine in our fine arts studio and cutting up old theatre costumes for fabric. All these years, she’s never needed a stylist when she could be her own – she’s been cutting her own shoulder-length layered hair all the way through our years in high school. I think it’s a waste that I had that huge white dress made for just one night of the International Debutante Ball, but I’m still scared of getting into trouble if I let her cut it up and make it over, so instead, I’ve brought all my other cocktail dresses from those few days of events at the Waldorf to SEM this semester, and she makes over one of the others instead. Of course, there are a fair number of girls who already have boyfriends, as well as those who manage to finagle a once-off deal with a prep-school princeling, but I’m perfectly content to stand in a circle disco-dancing with Elise and other friends from our class and our dorm, reveling in the special bond we’ve built through living together these four years one more time.

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Charles doesn’t seem to see prom the same way as I do, though; he emails me and asks me if I’ll be his date for the night. And since I owe him big time for being my debutante escort, I say yes; after all, I’ve got enough money saved up from two summers working at the Musgroves’ and my monthly allowance to pay for an air ticket to Detroit. When I tell Grandma, she tells me enthusiastically that she’ll pay for me to come back and have Mr. Hill come to the airport to get me. I’ve e-mailed Cheyenne on and off these past few years, so I know she’s not dating anybody; she likes to make these wry jokes that boys don’t see you as a girl when you can beat them on the track, and I think she’ll like to see some of my cross-country trophies even though they’re all minor ones and I never won gold the way she did. She’ll probably feel less lonely if she doesn’t have to go to prom alone, so I tell Charles I’ll hang out with her before prom to get ready together, and he can pick us both up from her house.

“Oh, Anne, how I wish I could be as lucky as you and Charles,” sighs Cheyenne, as I zip up her prom dress in the back. Unlike me, she could totally pull off a strapless tube dress and all the boys would turn their heads with shoulders like hers, but being her sensible, no-nonsense self, she’s still opted for spaghetti straps instead.

“Me and Charles?” I shrug and spread my arms palms up in a gesture of perplexity. “Cheyenne, what do you mean, lucky? Me and Charles are just like me and you; we came together in Pre-K when we were three, simply because our parents all decided to send us here instead of to public school, and that’s all there is to it. Could anything possibly be less romantic than that?”

“Well, who needs romance when they can have security?” comes Cheyenne’s reply. “Think about it, Anne. Charles has his daddy’s business waiting for him, and his mom and dad both love you to bits. And he’s always been so sweet to you, even though I know we were always half joking when we used to make fun of him being sweet on you. If you just hang on to him and treat him right, you know you’ll be nice and comfortable, and what more can a girl ask for?”

She’s got one thing right, for sure – Charles is sweet to me, but I’m not that sure I want Charles to be sweet on me. Just like the night when he escorted me at the Waldorf, his mom has taught him how to do all the right things – he’s brought a corsage each for Cheyenne and me to wear around our wrists and opens the doors of the Impala for us to get in, her in the rear and me in the front. Everybody kind of gasps when Charles and I get out of the car together, because our school – or rather, his school and my former school – goes from Pre-K3 to grade 12, and we’ve set a record for being the boy and girl who’ve been chummy for the longest time – all the way from the beginning right up to the very end. To me, buddies is all we are, though; except for the times when he’s dancing with me, we don’t hold hands the entire night, and we’d never thought of trying any of those things the other boys and girls who came in pairs are doing. At least, not until tonight. Deep into the night, the pairs start dropping out of the party, and he pulls me out of the building and over to a corner where several couples have already gotten the same idea, hiding in the shadows and making out.

“Should we, um, maybe, we could maybe try, y’know, like everybody else?” This is beyond awkward, but I guess, being prom dates and all, it’s our obligation to at least attempt to kiss. So even though I feel really blah about the whole thing, I guess it is sort of my duty to say yes, and we lean in and touch our lips to each other in a fumbling, hesitant way. We are not Patrick Swayze and Demi Moore from Ghost, definitely not Colin Firth and Jennifer Ehle from Pride and Prejudice, but Macaulay Culkin and Anna Chlumsky from My Girl, except that we’re in twelfth grade, not sixth. Almost as quickly and awkwardly as we came together, we both figure this wasn’t a great idea and pull apart again.

“Sorry,” says Charles. “Um, I mean, that – never mind. Friends anyway? You won’t have to fly back till Sunday afternoon, so why don’t you come by tomorrow and hang out? My mom says she’ll bake your favourite double chocolate chip cookies, just for the occasion.”

“Sure,” I say. “Of course, I’ll stop by. Don’t be too shocked if Hetty and Lulu are more my speed now with Super Mario, though. I haven’t had a chance to practice for the longest time.”

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Summer 1996, Long Island, NY

This summer, the last one before I head off to college, Father’s love affair with New York has superseded his wanderlust. Or rather, he has the opportunity for it to take precedence, because some distant acquaintances of his, whom I only know faintly as Madam Dalrymple and Miss Carteret, are renting a villa in southern France for the entire summer, and so Father is renting their summer home in Long Island for us to stay there. Ever since Liz and I established ourselves in the state of New York with her at Barnard and me at SEM, Father’s been obsessed with the lifestyles of blue-blooded New Yorkers like an itch he needs to scratch; instead of travelling far and wide like we used to, we’ve been spending more and more time hanging out in the Big Apple or going to the poshest upstate resorts. It’s almost like his way of keeping up with the Joneses; now that we’re supposedly making friends with all these girls from the richest East Coast families, he wants to show that he can live exactly like them too.

The house is on the very tip of Remsenburg, on sloping land overlooking the bay. It’s got its own swimming pool, so Liz is more than happy to lounge around on a pool float in her bikini all day, while Mary keeps bugging us to take her to the amusement park at Coney Island so she can ride the Ferris wheel. I manage to get a summer job at a candy store in East Moriches, and when Father and Grandma both throw up their hands in consternation, I just grin and say, “Well, how can a girl possibly say no to good candy? Besides, I get to meet everyone else my age on Long Island this way.”

Luckily, we came with all our cars, so as long as Liz is happy in the pool, I’m able to take the Audi every day to drive to work. Mr. Hill ends up driving everyone else downtown pretty often; I more or less know when they’ve gone to town, because Liz and Mary will be parading all the new clothes they bought. On a couple of my days off, I go with Grandma to the Guggenheim and to Moma, though most times I just like to hang out by the beach and let the sea breeze whip through my hair.

And then one hot, muggy night in July, it happens. We don’t actually see TWA800 go down, but as the news about it plays over and over on TV, I imagine how it must’ve been, a comet flaming out as it burst through the fading night sky. From the vantage point of the shop I work at, with a straight view down to the bay, I can see the Coast Guard and police crews at work, and a whole bunch of boaters all going there to gawk and stare. How those voyeurs can find entertainment out of other people’s misery, I don’t know; I walk down to the beach one day but keep a respectful distance from all the activity, scrunching my toes in the sand as my Tevas sink into it. I feel incredibly sad, because all these people thought they were going to Europe in the summer – just like Madam Dalrymple did, just like my family has in years past – and then, in a flash, it was all over. The trip of a lifetime, descending into the nightmare of a lifetime. And that’s when my choice comes clearly to me – if I can do anything at all to prevent another crash like this, that’s how I want to spend my life; and in a split second, I’ve decided on my major like that.

We stay in the Hamptons until the middle of August, and when we go back to Grosse Pointe, Grandma has a surprise for me. It’s a silver-grey Volkswagen Golf, with neat black leatherette seats, a CD player, and power everything. She even remembered I want the turbodiesel version because it’s better for the environment. It’s time for me to start packing up for MIT, and every day I sort out a part of my room and bundle up the stuff I want to bring to put into the trunk.

That last day when I head to school, I give Grandma a big, long hug, and tell her I love her. I’ve been making this mixtape specially for the long drive to college, a CD-R I’ve been burning all summer; it has all the songs of hope in it, combining songs from different decades like Imagine by John Lennon, We Are The World by Queen, and Heal The World by Michael Jackson. It’ll be the longest journey I’ve ever made on my own; I’ve packed my sleeping bag and blow-up mattress so I can crash with Mrs. Churchill in Buffalo on night one, and then with Elise’s family in Albany on night two, before she hops in with me and we go to our dorm on night three.

“Well, Anne. You’re an Elliot, and don’t ever forget that.” It’s probably the closest Father will ever get to bidding me a fond farewell, and I acknowledge him with a nod and a prompt “Yessir.”

Everybody else from the house gathers at the front porch as I get into the Golf to leave – not just Grandma and Liz and Mary, but both our maids and Mr. Hill and Mary’s au pair as well – and I see them all waving to me in the rear-view mirror as I drive off. A part of me feels a little bit sad to see them disappear into the distance, especially when they all came out specially to say goodbye, but then, I comfort myself, this is my family, and I’ll always be able to find a way to come back. As I go out onto the freeway, all alone on the open road, with Imagine playing on my car stereo, I know I am my own person at last, heading toward my adulthood and my future.

END OF PART I