It Would Have Been Horrible to Say All This
My family took a few road trips north and south to visit colleges. One thing that bothered me was that my parents scheduled the trips without really asking me whether I even wanted to go to college. It was just assumed that I did. I thought I would actually go to college back then, but their never even asking upset me a little bit nonetheless.
I talked to Booker about this in his living room, on his itchy plaid couch that looked as if it were made out of old-man pants, and he said, “The fight’s on, sister. It all starts now. You have to make some real-life choices.”
“What choices?” I asked.
“What type of person are you going to be?”
“What types are there?”
“Don’t play dumb with me. You know very well that there are two types.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“Well, there’s the type of person who says there are certain types of people and then tries to be one type or the other. And then there are others who say bananas to the whole concept of types and won’t allow themselves to be filed neatly away under some sort of ridiculously limiting category.”
“What type are you?” I asked.
“Oh, I don’t believe in types.”
“But you just said there are two types!”
“Those who believe in types and those who don’t.”
“You’re making my head hurt!”
“Bananas!”
“What?” I said, and then laughed.
“The point, Young Nanette, is not to wear a type like a set of prison shackles.”
Later, as I sat in the leather backseat of my mom’s Mercedes-Benz SUV on my way to my first “unofficial” college visit, I kept feeling as though I were actually shackled—like I was being carted off to market. These universities wanted my feet and my lungs and my thighs and my shins and my stomach and my forehead, and they wanted me to sweat for them and chase a ball around on a grass field and do whatever it took to get it into a net. It seemed sort of barbaric when I broke it down like that. There was an auction going on. My goal-scoring body was up for sale.
In the front seat, my parents talked a lot about my future—all the possible majors I could choose; the places I would travel if I played soccer for this or that college team, some of which even scheduled internationally in Europe and South America; and the lifelong benefits of belonging to certain alumni associations.
I kept getting mad at myself because I realized that there were many kids my age around the world who didn’t have enough food to eat or access to clean drinking water, and here I was, feeling imprisoned in a fifty-thousand-dollar luxury car en route to top universities that wanted to educate me for free.
Comparing myself to a slave.
Seriously?
I kept berating myself for being ungrateful, and yet I couldn’t shake the feeling that it was a trick somehow.
I knew I was privileged, but what good was that if I still didn’t get to make my own choices? Was it a privilege to be secretly miserable my entire life?
And when we were at the universities meeting with admissions officers and soccer coaches and players, I mostly kept quiet and observed my parents as they chatted with everyone about me as if I weren’t even in the room. Sometimes they’d say, “Isn’t that right, Nanette?” and I could tell they wanted me to speak more and pretend that I actually wanted to chitchat with all these strangers. But I didn’t find the landscaping as beautiful as my parents did, nor did I see the “storied history in the buildings.” Nor did I find the list of classes as intellectually stimulating, or the coaches’ philosophies as impressive, or the potential teammates as congenial as Mom and Dad did. And yet I knew it would have been horrible to say all this, so I said nothing. Instead, I smiled and nodded until the muscles in my face and neck cramped.
My parents kept asking me what I thought and I kept stalling, saying, “I don’t know. There’s so much to consider.”
“Well,” my father said in the car once our college tour was concluded, “after visiting five schools that all but promised you academic and athletic scholarships next year, I really don’t think you can make a bad choice.”
“I envy you,” Mom said.
So I just stared out the window and bit down on my tongue until it started to bleed.
8
Speeding Up the Process a Bit
Out of the blue one day, the first week of August, just before my senior year began, Booker told me he knew another teacher at another high school about a half hour’s drive away. “Just one more lonely kid who read my book at the right time, wrote to me, and then became an English teacher.”
I asked him if he had fans teaching at every high school in America.
He smiled. “There are a lot of lonely kids in this world, but the problem is that they don’t know about each other. If the lonely kids could just team up, a lot of good things would happen, but the world is incredibly afraid of lonely people teaming up, and so it does its best to keep them apart.”
“Why?”
“Because lonely people often have great ideas but no support. People with support too often have bad ideas but power. And you don’t give up power. No one does, regardless of whether they have good ideas or not. No one gives up power without a long, bloody fight—one that usually involves foul play. Lonely people typically can’t stomach treachery, and that’s another problem. They tend to tell the truth and fight fair. So we need art and music and poetry for the lonely people to rally around.” Booker looked at me for a moment, smiled knowingly, and then said, “I think you should meet this kid who’s been sending me poetry. I like his words. You two would get along. He calls himself Little Lex. He was a student of the teacher I just mentioned. She gave him a copy of my book, just like Jared Graves gave it to you. He also became obsessed with Wrigley. So you already have that in common.”