Chapter Three #2
I’d never loved RISD and this semester really sucked.
I’d gotten a D and a C-minus for midterm grades, the first in Spatial Geometry (if I wanted this much math, I’d have majored in it), the other in Ambient Interfaces (too many missed classes, plus the prof had an annoying laugh and bad breath).
Then things had gone sour the first week of the new semester when I was hauled before the disciplinary referral board for something ridiculous that had happened before Christmas break.
Having volunteered with some other guys to decorate the common area for the holidays, I’d gotten shit-faced.
We all had, but I was the one who had written, in spray snow on the picture window, “Fuck you and the sleigh you rode in on.” Some dean had walked by, seen it, and made a complaint.
The students on the discipline committee—a trio of dweebs—listened to my lame defense about having exercised my First Amendment rights.
“I’d like to think this is a college , not a prison ,” I said in closing.
I concluded that me and RISD were a bad fit.
I didn’t bother to withdraw; I just drove away in my rusted-out Chevy Chevette and headed west. I was that sure that Emily was the one for me and the grand gesture I was making was going to convince her that I was the one for her. How many other dudes would ditch their college education for love?
Even gunning it, the trek from Providence to San Diego took me almost four days and earned me two speeding tickets (one in Pennsylvania, the other just outside of Little Rock, Arkansas), plus a loitering fine somewhere along Route 40 for napping on the shoulder of a highway.
I played the radio all the way out there—listening a billion times to Rihanna, CeeLo, and that sappy James Blunt song “You’re Beautiful” on the pop stations and, as I drove west, Kenny Chesney, Rascal Flatts, and a bunch of stations hawking Jesus.
The news was redundant, too—the Patriot Act gets renewed, the polar ice caps are shrinking, the trouble at Abu Ghraib prison.
And if you’re planning to go quail hunting with Dick Cheney, better think again.
When I couldn’t stand the radio anymore, I’d turn it off and enjoy the silence for a while until my father’s voice would start playing in my head.
“But deciding to leave isn’t the same as flunking out, Dad,” I’d insisted, interrupting his usual refrain about me being a disappointment to him.
That earworm had begun in middle school when I’d gotten caught shoplifting Upper Deck basketball cards at the hobby store in the mall.
The night my buddies and I had gotten pinched at Lantern Hill for underage drinking I’d been an embarrassment to him and myself, he’d said.
(Of course, when he picked me up at state police barracks, he reeked of scotch.) I’d humiliated him the day he found out I’d gotten fired from my summer job at the A she stayed in Cali with me.
I think it was mid-July when she developed something called deep vein thrombosis.
Fearing a blood clot down the road, her doctor took her off the pill and prescribed a diaphragm instead.
It wasn’t until she got pregnant that we read the fine print that said diaphragms had a 4 percent failure rate if you’d used them correctly every time and a 12 to 18 percent failure rate if you hadn’t.
A few times in the heat of the moment we might have gotten careless, I don’t really remember.
But whatever the reason, the home test kit said Emily was pregnant.
When I took a knee and showed her the diamond, she cried.
Said yes. But when Emily called to tell her mom we were engaged, Betsy had news of her own.
She had breast cancer and needed a mastectomy.
Between wanting to be there for her mom during her recuperation and wanting her mom closer during her pregnancy, Emily lobbied for us to go back east.
“You can fly back when she has her surgery, help out for a couple of weeks while she recuperates if you want, but you and I have a life out here now, babe,” I said. “Maybe after the baby’s born, your mother can come out here and—”
She shook her head. Told me her mom needed her and she needed her mom.
“Yeah, but what about the teaching job you just got? What are you going to do—resign before you’ve even started?”
And that’s just what she did. I gave in. We rented and packed up a U-Haul trailer, typed Betsy’s address into MapQuest, and hit the road. There went our California life.
The trip back east was hell. I had bought the cheapest trailer hitch kit that U-Haul sold and hadn’t installed it right.
We were just over the state line into Arizona when the trailer broke free, just missed the car behind us, and then went flying off the side of the highway and into a gulley.
That set us back a whole day, plus the cost of a better hitch and a nondescript motel room that had bedbugs.