Chapter 5: Leaving Home
Chapter Five Leaving Home
When my children were babies, I would lie next to them as they fell asleep and try to imagine where they went before they woke again. They wouldn't know what a minute or an hour was yet, or that 24 hours make a day, or that day would come after night. Did they go back to the place they had just come from right before birth? Maybe they came from god and went back to god in their sleep until the waking world began to take over for good. In a way, it was like this for me leaving home after years of childhood and adolescence on the farm. The awakening was rude, ragged and blinding.
But first I had to complete the last year of being my parents' child at home. It was really their year, 1955, the year I was 16. They carved it out in their imaginations and propelled my little boat through it with great force.
In that year, I was the Student Body Secretary, the Business and Professional Women's Club Girl of the Month, a delegate to the Oregon 1955 Student Council Workshop at the University of Oregon in which I sang in a talent show and returned to organize a "Safe Teen" driving program for our high school, a member of Girls' League, a member of the Rainbow Girls, acted in the senior play, cheered with the Booster Club, and maintained A's and B's in all classes (which included English, Drama-Speech, Biology, US History, Shorthand, PE, and Health), missing school a total of 11 days and never being tardy. I review these facts in the clippings and photos my mother saved, and I find it hard to put this evidence together with the memory of being shy, awkward, taller than most (especially boys), fighting off ferocious acne, and understanding completely that I was not cheerleader material or destined to stroll the halls with the reigning athletes.
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I do remember that despite my grades and accomplishments I was not voted into Honor Society, a shock and shame to me and, of course, my father. I was, however, the only one of my class who applied to and was accepted at Reed College, famous for its high academic requirements and excellent liberal arts education. Largely because of the influence of my family, all ex-Reedies, my husband-to-be arrived at Reed the year before I did and even chose his major, Russian History, as part of this spell. We became engaged the summer before I began my freshman year and he his sophomore.
Receipts show that my parents paid about $150/month for my freshman year at Reed (though I'm not sure if this was just for lodging and books). There was no student loan or scholarship to my recollection, and I don't remember that I had a student job. Considering the thousands of dollars a year it costs to attend Reed now, it seems a small amount, but at the time it must have been a serious financial burden.
That year 1956-57 a New Women's Dorm had just been built and this was where I lived with three other young women - two freshmen and a junior. There was a common room in the middle of each unit and a bedroom with bunkbeds on either side. It was on an upper floor and windows looked out toward the edge of campus. All three of my roommates were from out of state. Though my parents were well educated, I began to understand how limited my own experiences were coming from a small rural Oregon community when I learned how many Reedies had been to plays, foreign films, and even opera. Besides being a year older than I, my classmates were culturally ahead of me. My classes included Humanities, Biology, Art History, and Russian language. Humanities was the heart and soul of the Reed liberal arts structure. There were huge reading lists and great leaps through world history. When we couldn't keep up, we read Classics comic books of the great novels, like Les Miserables. In Biology, I had to actually dissect a frog, though not cats (which were in a bin with formaldehyde outside the classroom), in the first year. Art History was taught by a man who was famous for his calligraphy and left notes on my papers in his beautiful handwriting. My favorite class was Russian, because the teacher was very sweet and I found I had a knack for and love of languages that has lasted all these years.
In the middle of the year, my fiance made a decision to transfer to the University of Washington in Seattle because they had the best Far Eastern Languages and History Department on the west coast. But before he left, in December, an event happened that deeply traumatized us both. His younger brother, who was exactly my age to the month and who had been a very charismatic and popular athlete in high school, was suddenly killed in an auto accident. He was thrown from his car into a field, where he lay in the dark until he was brought to the local hospital where he died. It was my first experience with the death of someone I knew so well who was also a young person. The winter months became much darker and more depressing than they might have been, and I was further swayed toward the decision to marry at the end of that year. I also read a romantic novel at around that time, which told the story of a young couple who were not glamorous, who were just plain and ordinary, but who found a deep fulfilling love with each other. Since I saw myself as plain, I made myself believe that this marriage could work. It turned out as the years passed, that while I may have been plain, I was anything but ordinary.
So in July 1957, on a hot day, cinched into a fitted (but plain) wedding dress, surrounded by twittering bridesmaids, in a church I did not attend, I was married. It all made me so lightheaded that I had to carry a handkerchief soaked with ammonia in case I began to pass out on my way down the aisle. But a short time later, changed into a smart tailored dress with a big corsage and a small hat, I strode from the church with my new husband amid clouds of rice to begin our time together. Incredibly, I was a "sweet, rosebud, pure virgin bride," as we said in those days. After a very short honeymoon to Portland, a distance of only 100 miles, where all I remember was the wedding night, we returned to set up housekeeping in a small apartment above the garage of neighbors up the road from the farm where I grew up. We read Catcher in the Rye in bed together, and I baked cheese biscuits for our first invited guests, my in-laws.
That fall we moved into a tiny basement apartment near the University of Washington campus and entered our sophomore and junior years respectively. The street I walked down to reach classes passed through sorority row, a world I was never to know. From the time I first left home, I began to write long descriptive letters to my parents, which my mother kept. It seems amazing to me now that I handwrote them almost daily. Already in October of that sophomore year, I was beginning to feel the pressure of comparing my own worth to that of my brilliant and very studious young husband. I wrote, "I can't explain exactly what goes on in my mind when I watch him in his other world. He's so avid about this world and so rarely comes all the way out of it or shares any of it with me. Somehow it manages to make me feel as though I've fallen at the wayside. It's like I was a little old car put-putting along the road feeling proud that I was holding up as good as I was, when suddenly a big high-powered Cadillac comes roaring by and splatters dust all over me. I feel like I want to crawl off in the ditch and just sit there and let my tires go flat." By spring, in the virtually daily letters home, I mentioned having been diagnosed with possible mononucleosis (a fairly common college-aged illness) and prescribed pills for both anxiety and depression. There is no mention of drinking, though I remember discovering that you could buy hard liquor in grocery stores in Washington, unlike Oregon. I was homesick and overwhelmed.
The following year I chose Elementary Education as a major. It was quite common for women to choose nursing or teaching as a career in those days, though I had no real leaning toward either. What I loved most was languages and during my life I have studied Latin, Russian, German, Swedish, French, Spanish, and Hebrew to one extent or another. There seemed no real career choice for this skill at the time, however.
By spring of my junior year, I was receiving all A's and B's in my classes and still feeling very anxious. In May I reported home that "I've been getting more and more tense and upset and yesterday I just couldn't take it any more so I went down to see the doctor at the medical center. I was so upset while I was talking to her that I was shaking all over and I really had to struggle to keep from bursting into tears. She gave me some pills to calm me down a little so I could study and she helped me make an appointment to see one of the staff psychiatrists tomorrow to talk things over. It's just that I'm so worried that I won't be able to finish all my work this quarter. The doctor told me that many students come in with the same kind of problems." Once again, I was given pills.
My husband was sailing forward in his field and won a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship for graduate study at UC Berkeley in the fall. He was selected to Phi Beta Kappa, a national scholarship honorary. All the family members on both sides of the family came to Seattle for his graduation.
And so our time in Seattle ended, and we came home again to Albany to spend the summer before we left for California. It was actually a beautiful summer with lots of time spent hiking and traveling around Oregon. It was the end of two decades of a rather sheltered life in the Northwest. It would not be much longer before my life would take an international turn and my marriage would begin to crumble. But in that summer, it seemed a certain bright future was ahead that would be worth all the sacrifices of everyone involved.
LETTER TO A YOUNG WIFE
Yesterday the letter came
It said, "The cherry blooms."
Between the lines it added:
"In our house are empty rooms."
The letter said, "A pheasant came,
Its feathers were like bronze."
It whispered, too, "We miss your step
Across these April lawns."
I read, "The blackbirds gather
In the rows behind the plow,"
And I wanted so to tell them
How I long to be there now.
I know that swallows fly to missions,
Daffodils return each year.
Why is it only I must leave
These things I hold so dear?
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