HER GRADUATION

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“The Beginner plays within the boundaries.

The Competent explore the boundaries.

The Master knows when to explore them.”

(unknown)

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HER GRADUATION*

What was the reasoning behind it? Well… it wasn’t very hard to figure out. She just didn’t want them there. She’d worked quite a bit on the invention of herself and she’d made some gains, she thought, and they would have perhaps ruined the construct (or so it seemed.) To have them there in the flesh would have just been too difficult.

It was ever thus, it seemed, from childhood on. They were too foreign, too short, too crude, too poor, too lacking in the graces that everyone else’s parents seemed to have. God, it was bad enough to suffer the surname: unpronounceable, unspell-able, unidentifiable, or at least not easily so. Even when they weren’t present, her parents, her family, her background would somehow manage to embarrass her. Absolutely no one unwrapped cream cheese and green pepper sandwiches on dark bread in the cafeteria when absolutely everyone else had white bread, peanut butter and jelly. Her sandwiches were a dead giveaway: they screamed their provenance from some foreign Eastern European place, and it was too too humiliating. After awhile, she didn’t even bother to take stuff out of the bag. She’d root through on a hunt for something acceptable, but most of the time the whole thing just went into the garbage. She knew this was an outrageous action, because the very buying of food for her parents was part of an economic struggle from week to week. She wished she could just have money so that she could buy lunches every day, especially that macaroni and cheese, but that just never seemed to be a possibility.

By the time of graduation she was pretty adept at her own brand of ‘damage control’ so Mom and Dad just never came to school. They were too hard-working and work-worn anyway, and she just never told them about activities or concerts or events. Since school was such a distance from home, it wasn’t hard to keep them apart from it all.

In her own heart she was pretty excited about graduation. It was to be held onstage at Carnegie Hall – my God, Carnegie Hall! Where Artur Rubenstein and Jascha Heifetz played! That was what was so great about the High School of Music & Art and going into Manhattan every day. It was her ticket out of Little Neck, New York, where she’d lived all her young life yet knew she was just passing through. The school was both window and road to untold privileges, and Manhattan to her seemed like The Land of Oz. All that glitter, all that refinement, all that cement.

Of course, her boyfriend Steven’s parents would be at graduation – they lived on 83^rd Street right off Central Park West (true, it was OFF, not ON the park) in a good-looking apartment, so that was all the more reason for keeping her parents away. She downplayed the occasion: it’s just going to be for an hour in the morning, Ma. You hate to get dressed up so early and Daddy has to go to work anyway, so don’t bother. It’s no big deal.) Oh God, the very thought of her mother meeting Steven and his parents!

So there she was, putting on cap and gown with friends backstage but without anyone out front for her in the audience.

The orchestra of the High School of Music & Art was playing Pomp and Circumstance in that beautiful wooden hall and she certainly did choke up as they all marched down that aisle and took their seats at the very front. Smatterings of applause were bestowed along with the awarded diplomas for each graduate who traversed the wide and famous stage and squinted out into the diamond horseshoe. For her part, she felt very self-conscious tripping across those boards, as thrilling as it was. No, yes, no, yes, it was really all so exciting, so exciting!

After, out on 57^th Street in front of Carnegie Hall, she rushed about; they all did, with tears and giggles, to this friend and that, laughing, hugging, being caught up by it all.

It felt, though, anti-climactic. The day had been so anticipated, and now at the moment of closure, there was a letdown. Groupings of family and friends weren’t her groupings, and it was then that she felt alone, quite alone. She’d made no specific plans, and she’d vaguely figured to be included in someone’s plans, maybe Steven’s, but when the moment came, that didn’t happen. Lynn, her best friend, wasn’t there, Lynn, the acid-tongued, precocious sixteen-year-old: acerbic, intellectual, misanthropic, neurotic, fascinating… Lynn, who lived in the Brevoort in a corner apartment that had a fireplace, with Kandinskis and Oriental art on the walls and Oriental rugs on the floor, whose mother was incredibly sleek, elegant, and icy. Lynn, who’d initiated her into certain rites of passage, was actually only a sophomore and a full two years behind her at school and wasn’t herself yet initiated into any graduation rites at all.

She thought about going over to Lynn’s house… but it didn’t seem to be the thing to do. Her throat kept remembering the lump of the morning, and Lynn was so cynical.

She returned her cap and gown to the stale little room backstage and she turned her feet towards the subway, to the IRT. There was nothing for it but to go home. She was a high school graduate now. As she had for all of her high school years, she looked out from the subway train groaning through Jackson Heights and Flushing, the skyline of Manhattan perpetually distant.

Home was where she went, out to the very edge of Queens, to her mother’s pot roast and beautifully ironed blouses, with the summer and her life stretching and flapping before her like a great white sheet on a laundry line.

And the stupid part about it was that she headed them off at the pass for the morning of her college graduation as well - for the same reasons. With the same effect of isolation.

But that afternoon, alone, college diploma next to her, she sat on a hillside overlooking the campus she’d just graduated away from and brought them close. She wrote her parents a long and feeling letter full of gratitude and emotion: love. Her cup runneth over.

by-line: Judith Auberjonois

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*OK. I’ll ’fess up. Mine. MY graduations…

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