You Are My Heart and Other Stories Read Online Free PDF Page A

own, and about what we’d do when we got there, but with Karen, I found myself talking more about what I felt about my family—about what it was like to be an only child with parents who made each other miserable and who took their misery out on me. I talked about how angry I got sometimes—totally out of control—and how this made me do some of the crazy things I did so that I could get my parents angry back at me and then have a justification for shouting at them or storming out of the house.
    I knew my anger was probably a cover-up, I admitted, and that what really bothered me—why I got so angry—was because of how sad and lonely I felt a lot of the time. Nothing I ever did was enough for my parents—if I got a 98 in a course, why hadn’t I gotten a hundred? If I cleaned up the kitchen and living room while they were at work, why hadn’t I cleaned the bathroom too?—so that being an only child who was always being criticized made me end up feeling that some essential part of me was missing—as if, without having given me a brother or sister, my parents had somehow never finished making me.
    Karen talked a lot about what it was like to be the oldest girl in a large family—to be put in the position of being responsible for her younger brothers and sisters, and to be blamed when they did things that upset her mother, her grandmother, or her
Uncle Joshua. She was determined to go to college, but whereas her mother and her Uncle Joshua were counting on Olen to go, the idea of Karen going to college was out of the question. Even though she’d always been a straight-A student, her mother had insisted she take a commercial course of studies so that when she graduated she could get a job as a secretary and help support the family.
    My parents didn’t fight me about going to college the way Karen’s mother and her Uncle Joshua did, but I wanted—desperately—to get away to an out-of-town college, and, because my parents claimed they didn’t have enough money to send me, they insisted I apply only to the city colleges—Brooklyn, Queens, or C.C.N.Y.—which had free tuition then. “With a brain like yours,” my mother would argue, “why should you go somewhere where you’ll be a little fish in a big pond, when you can live at home and be a big fish in a little pond?”
    When I argued back that if I didn’t win a scholarship, I’d work my way through with part-time and summer jobs, they’d become even more upset, my father yelling that you had to be a total idiot to pay for an education that wasn’t as good as one you could get for free (and presenting as proof the fact that C.C.N.Y. had produced more Nobel prize winners than any college in the country, including Harvard), and my mother starting in with what it would be like for me to be a poor boy among rich boys at some Ivy League school where I’d have to work all the time, even on vacations, and how all she ever wanted in life was to spare me suffering.
    So Karen and I talked about these things, and by acting out antic responses that even I, for all my anger and big mouth, didn’t have the courage for—like telling my father the reason he wanted me to go to a place like Brooklyn College instead of a place like Swarthmore or Dartmouth was because it would show him up for the failure he was—we were able to laugh about our situations, and to console each other.
    We also talked, at length, about our feelings and about how
wonderful it was to feel free to talk about our feelings. Sometimes, too, we fantasized about enrolling in an out-of-town college together—a small liberal arts school in upstate New York or New England, or a school that specialized in the arts like Oberlin or Antioch or Bard, where people would be more tolerant of an interracial couple—and how, if we had to, one of us would work at a job for four years and put the other through