Chapter 1: The Get-Away
As I blaze past the green fields of corn in my 1987 black Honda Prelude, I look in my rearview mirror and see my sister Ann’s beige minivan following behind. It is 1996, and Ann is driving with our dad, who I suspect is agitated, and her baby son Samir. Ann agreed to help drive my stuff to college in Mt. Vernon, five hours east of Omaha. I imagine what I would be facing had Ann not been so saintly as to come: my dad with a U-Haul latched to the back of his 1982 Buick Riviera, embarrassing me as its whale-like body pulled into the circle of my dormitory. My 66-year-old father would have alternated between cussing about what we were doing, flirting with the college girls, and making unbearable jokes to the guys. With Ann with us, everything is mediated and goes much more smoothly.
When we pull over to a gas station to take a break, Ann points out she’s worried by the way I change lanes. I turn on my turn signal and just go, not far enough ahead when I pull in front of the semis. I think, C’mon, I’ve been driving for two years, I know what I’m doing. I think I’m grown up, I sold dead relatives’ jewelry on my own to buy this car; I can drive it. But I’m more careful when I get back on the road. I’m grateful to Ann. I’m grateful she gave me a job over the summer nannying Samir, gave me something to do this awkward summer before college and let me pretend a little bit that he’s my baby, though I’m so glad I’ve made it this far without becoming a mom. That has been a goal.
I remember taking this trip across Iowa with my dad back when things were calmer between us at the beginning of my senior year. I wanted to go away to Seattle for college. My brother Ron was dating a girl from there, and I thought it seemed like a cool place and far away. I was mad at my dad. I was tired of being raised by a single, old man, tired of not having a mom. I wanted to understand why my mom killed herself when I was four, and I hadn’t figured it out.
Tom, my dad’s youngest son of the five kids from his first marriage, was visiting my dad and I for an afternoon. I was considering going to the University of Iowa, compromising a bit since I only had the little I’d inherited from my grandma to help pay for college. My dad had suffered financial losses that had led him to file bankruptcy when I was sixteen. We he had leave our big, beautiful home that we’d shared with my mom and moved into a condo off a highway.
Tom encouraged me to consider a small college. He said I should be a big fish in a small pond and mentioned Cornell College, which was close to Iowa City where he’d lived for the past ten years. He put everything in such a way that I thought it was my idea to go to Cornell. I got excited about their one-course-at-a-time and felt nonconformist to be considering such a unique system of education. I thought I might even be able to show my dad that I was just as smart as him if I could table math and science for awhile and focus on one-course-at-a-time.
When my dad took me for the college visit, we got on the Interstate and headed east and drove for hours talking. I kept asking “Shouldn’t we look at a map?” but my Dad kept saying he knew where was he was going, like he had already memorized America. But he drove us straight to Mt. Vernon, getting off at all the right exits. We stayed in a hotel in Cedar Rapids and found a restaurant we would later frequent every time he visited me.
But before I made the decision to go there, I was shocked when my dad seemed to pull a route to a cemetery out of his sleeve, where he showed me the graves of my great-grandmother and great-grandfather who he revealed met at Cornell. I realized I’d been set-up, but I fell too in love with the college to care.
I can still remember the peppery-haired, bearded English professor with a rich, seasoned voice who sold me on the college experience at Cornell. He told us about the London trip where they took students on a theatre tour during one 3 ½ week class. I couldn’t believe a college class could actually go to London. The more I heard during the English class I sat in on, the more I couldn’t believe this was real. My dad chatted up the senior who gave us a tour of the campus. It looked like what I’d always thought a college should look like without ever having visited one, aside from Nebraska's biggest university. It was a distance but not too far from home, it was beautiful, I had family roots there, it seemed manageable and stimulating, and I was sold.
Now that it was time to leave, though, I was much more emotionally complex. I couldn’t believe I was leaving my dad. I didn’t know if he’d be okay without me. What would he be without me? I didn’t know what I’d be without him. I’d fought with him so much my senior year. I now had a serious boyfriend, and my dad could do nothing but annoy me. I hated the condo where we lived, even though I had the basement to myself, which I decorated with a framed poster of “The Scream” and a futon with a dark, abstract pattern. The condo didn’t feel like home after living my whole life in the only house where I’d known my mom. My dad said that maybe this was nature, that parent and child must war before the child leaves home just so they can leave the nest. I hated how my dad seemed to have a stupid answer for everything.
I thought my dad must have done something to make my mom kill herself, but I hadn’t figured it out yet. I tried to figure it out through writing. I interviewed everyone I knew who'd known her and wrote a column for my high school newspaper about her suicide. I’m sure no one in my audience could relate, and perhaps I was horrifying them. But I needed to figure it out. And I felt that I needed to get away from my dad to do it.
On the day I left for college, I was filled with so much more than hate and resentment. I loved my dad, and many aspects of my life in Nebraska, but I was confused. I had just returned from a trip to San Francisco paid for my mom’s aunt, who I barely knew. I stayed with my mom’s cousin who worked as a scientific researcher at Stanford University. My mom’s cousin Margaret, which was also my mom’s name before she had it legally changed to Stephanie, was generously determined to show me what life held outside of Nebraska. Over lunch at what she carefully pointed out was an authentic Mexican food restaurant, she told me that Ronald Reagan was not the hero my dad touted. She said he was a horrible man who had invented a lie called the trickle-down theory. The rich stayed rich, and the poor got poorer. But my dad loved Ronald Reagan. My dad was named Ron and was a lawyer who wore suits every day; as a child, I had imagined he was just as capable of being elected as Ronald Reagan. I didn’t know why Margaret had such a vendetta against Ronald Reagan, but I wanted to find out more about what the problem with Republicans was all about.
Margaret had gone to school at Grinnell College, in Iowa, so she tantalized me with praises of an intellectual existence outside Nebraska, my dad, and Omaha’s Republican influence. After doing well in college, she’d gone out to San Francisco, and still there, she introduced me to the new tastes of dim sum, Japanese food, the subway system, and the beauty of the San Francisco hills. She said the world was corrupt and that being a scientific researcher was the only ethical profession she could think of. She thought not even teaching was a suitable career because even then you’re grading and evaluating people. She had a beautiful home, which she owned with her husband, who was a very kind man, was as nuclear physicist at Stanford, and was much less bitter than Margaret. They had shelves full of books, and she assured me that Gore Vidal and Norman Mailer were more important than the books that shelved my dad’s library.
I came home amazed by San Francisco but resentful of Margaret, who had never had children and refused to watch anything but documentaries. I felt belittled by her but also impressed by all that she had shown me. Mostly, I felt confused. I loved my dad and Omaha and didn’t want to hate them or leave them, but she made me feel like the more I learned, the more I would want to move away. I didn’t want to fight with my dad, and I didn’t want to be alone when I said goodbye.
The goodbye was hard, sad, and made me cry, yet also made me feel weird for being curious about this new chapter. I wanted to succeed in college and make new friends, but I was also so tied to home. I didn’t want my boyfriend in Nebraska to forget about me. And I also didn’t want to squander this opportunity. It was my inheritance from the Hammonds, my mother’s family, who were now all dead, that was paying for 1/4 of my education. None of the Hammonds had gone to college, and they had worked hard for their money and to survive and have happy times despite the dysfunction of their family’s existence. I wanted to understand my family, the damage of their history, and I wanted to make something positive of my life. I would study as much as I needed to get straight A’s, and I would try not to live the mistakes of my mother’s footsteps. I had a boyfriend I loved in Nebraska. I didn’t know how or if we’d stay together, but I was satisfied on the romance front. I decided to focus and start learning everything I could.
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