Who You Lose on the Path to “Success”
The summer before my junior year of high school, I flew across the Pacific Ocean and touched down on North American soil after a shaky landing at the Ottawa MacDonald-Cartier International Airport. I was fifteen years old, alone, and without a return ticket. The border control officer glanced at the birthdate on my passport and, brows furrowed, scrutinized me through the glass panel.
“Can I see your parental consent letter?” he asked. Damn it. “I didn’t know I needed one,” I fumbled. He nodded sternly and scribbled something on my customs form that, despite its illegibility, clearly boded nothing pleasant. He handed my passport back to me. “The Immigration Office, Miss, to your left.”
I sat in the plastic chair of the Immigration Office, straw-haired and excessively tan from the exposure of Hawaiian rays, and explained that I was not a teenage runaway attempting to disappear into the Canadian wilderness. I looked like a Beat Generation-fangirl-meets-Huck-Finn, which hardly helped my case. The phrase “The Road Less Traveled” was thinly sketched in light blue letters across my t-shirt, a re-assembly of verses from the famous Robert Frost poem, “The Road Not Taken.”
The road I was actually taking was paved with tiles of gold and worn down by three centuries of fine carriages, Rolls-Royce Phantoms and BMWs.
The road I was actually taking was paved with tiles of gold and worn down by three centuries of fine carriages, Rolls-Royce Phantoms and BMWs. As old as America itself, it existed in its own theoretical dimension as the textbook trajectory of American elites. And yet, up until that year, I had never heard of Andover, Exeter, Deerfield or their ivy-shaped promises. Their names came to me as Google search results for “best prep schools in the U.S.” —like the wild-eyed fugitive I was suspected of being, I stumbled unsteadily onto this gilded path, my presence neither incidental nor entirely accidental.
I thought I was starting a journey, while, in fact, I was ending one. For some, travel evokes evasion: a break of a pattern, an escape from the norm. For my mother and I travel was the norm, and, like bobbing buoys cut loose from their anchoring chords, we drifted wherever the tide led. We had no permanent address. We changed cities and even countries as the leaves fell or the cicadas sang, a pair of sisterly tumbleweeds that had no apprehension about up-rootedness; if the wind blew east and new worlds beckoned, then off we went. Whether we were standing at the edge of white Canadian plains or watching the Huangpu River crash against the piers of the Bund, we could hardly tell you where we’d be the next year—no discernable path extended ahead, and that was the beauty of it all. We were formidable partners, she and I; a pasty-skinned French woman forever dressed in black and her little China doll, steadfast in their picaresque zeal. Yet she was a concerned parent, and I think that buried deep beneath her casual willingness to move me from school to school (sometimes even mid-school year) was the fear that she had set me on no particular path. Where would I end up? Neither of us knew.
When I was fourteen she asked the age-old question: Why don’t you go to America? Not “why don’t we go to America?” She was sending me off onto that legendary road that she knew existed seven thousand miles away, one of buzzing wasps and ivory clock towers, one too narrow for us both. So off I went to cross the milestones of my new journey alone: entering the continent as an unaccompanied minor, graduating from Andover with no beaming parents clapping behind me, and moving myself into college while, all around me, teary mothers bid their children farewell. “How can your mother afford to send you to prep school?” asked the immigration officer.
It hadn’t yet occurred to me that a full-ride to prep school and college wasn’t so much a common right but a privilege in itself.
It was a good question. We had evaded the class system. We were neither poor nor wealthy, but all in all we had no house, no car, no savings, and no assets other than a few cardboard boxes of clothes, books and potted plants that we moved from apartment to apartment whenever our lease was up. All along we had abstractly planned to rely on two words: Financial Aid. I was born in New York City and therefore a U.S. citizen. This meant access to private institutions that abided by a merit-based or need-based policy. As long as I got in, no wealth barriers would stand in my way—for me it all seemed straightforward and meritocratic, almost like a right that came with my citizenship. It hadn’t yet occurred to me that a full-ride to prep school and college wasn’t so much a common right but a privilege in itself. Back then, I thought it would cost nothing.
Five years later, my mother writes: We have paid dearly for it all. In fact, the most terrible price: us, it would seem. The rental Chevy pulled into the dorm’s parking lot mere seconds before Mom’s collapse. Cold sweat pearled on her forehead as she turned off the engine, white knuckles clenching the steering wheel. A few days before she’d broken her back, and could only crawl on all fours to get from place to place.
We had had rosy projections of a final Thelma-and-Louise trip from Québec to Massachusetts, me humming out the rolled-down windows as she warned me about cafeteria cookies and cocaine and boarding school vices of the sort. Instead she had gritted her teeth and announced some dubious improvement in her broken back to drive me to my promised land on time. Sitting up straight happens to be the worst possible position a person with a broken back can be in. She began to lose her vision on the I-95—“IT’S FLASHING WHITE EVERYWHERE,” she screamed as she swerved spastically into the neighboring lane, narrowly avoiding a car that whistled by. After dropping me off in front of Day Hall, she dragged her almost inert body into the nearby Courtyard Marriot and stayed horizontal for the next three days. Her brush with the tender lawns and red towers of my new life was replaced by staring contests with the hotel room’s wallpaper. “It’s okay,” she told me, “I’ll see it all when I come back again for graduation.”
Only she didn’t. My senior spring, the “Road Less Traveled” t-shirt was firmly stashed at the bottom of a musty drawer as I advanced in a procession of white dresses and blue striped ties. It must have been quite an aerial view: little white and blue dots in two parallel lines that curved with symmetrical unison and arranged themselves into a giant circle around the school’s emblematic armillary sphere. A sea of parents formed an additional layer of insulation, more than a few bleary-eyed with the pride of seeing their offspring fall into the right place in history, diploma in hand.
At the end of the ceremony we all ran towards the sphere, cheers and screams piercing through the tepid air of that early summer day. For a few seconds the convergence of our three century-old collective experience was physical and absolute. Earlier that month, my mother assured me on the phone that she’d fly from China to watch me graduate, if I wanted to. I tried to picture her in her eternal black tunic, standing alone amongst cuff-linked fathers and powdered mothers. Two thousand dollars poorer and seven thousand miles away from the path on which she had continued her solitary drift. I hesitated.
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, and I—
I said, “No, it’ll be fine. Don’t come.”
My sophomore year at Yale, I went through a terrible break-up with a wealthy Upper East Sider who, mere months before, had written me about imaginary proposal scenes that took place in the New York apartment we’d move into after graduation. I called my mother, sitting alone in the Davenport courtyard with sunglasses shielding my blood-shot eyes. “Come to America for my spring break,” I told her, “we’ll rent a car and we’ll drive through the southwest and we’ll go to the Grand Canyon and wherever you had dreamed of going. It’ll be like the old days.” She said that’d be wonderful. But as the months passed I did not mention it again and, instead, spent the break on the Upper East Side, relapsing into old habits.
“Here we are,” I remember thinking, “unhappy Yalies on Long Island watching a movie about unhappy Yalies on Long Island.”
I continued being with this boy on and off that year; and of course he had a house in the Hamptons, and of course I ended up there that May. It was the May when Baz Luhrmann’s Great Gatsby came out, and we drove out to East Hampton one night to see it. “Here we are,” I remember thinking, “unhappy Yalies on Long Island watching a movie about unhappy Yalies on Long Island.” It was the classic American tale. The woods we speeded through on our way back were pitch black, silent, menacing. That night, lying in a bed where I did not want to be, I cried into his arms, feeling suspended in a void too great to comprehend. I told him it was loneliness. “I’m here,” he said, but I was thinking about a woman in a black tunic on the other side of the world.
It was only a year later, as I was chopping vegetables on a kitchen island in France during Christmas, that my aunt told me my mother had tentatively planned out our entire Great American Road Trip. She had been heartbroken that I had dropped the idea, but never said another word to me about the abandoned project. “She was so hopeful about it,” my aunt added, “but I guess the time when the two of you lived that life has passed.”
A sinking feeling of guilt came over me, and I wanted to go find my mother, press her hard against me and say that time would never pass, but instead I kept chopping the vegetables mechanically. Our two roads had diverged so far that I didn’t know if she could even grasp the dust that settled in my wake. I wanted to drive with her to the red cliffs of the Grand Canyon right that second, tangle-haired and sweaty and singing to eighties tunes with the windows down, but it was all too far and too late.
She and I—truly, we were once formidable.
