19

In anger at my parents, I dropped out of college during the summer between freshman and sophomore year. I wasn’t unhappy with college; I was tired of my parents’ second-guessing me. I would show them. I found a job with the college’s vice-president, au pairing for his two young children. I got to go to college and live near the campus without being enrolled. Suited me.

The V-P’s young wife took a peculiar pleasure in hiring a “Sisters” student to live with the family, to push the two-year-old in a stroller around town, to drive the five-year-old to school, and to help with laundry. She took it upon herself to teach me the pitfalls of marriage and motherhood. She told me to do the chores that “just kinda wasted my precious time.” While it was not my program, I went along.

Libby was, I guess, about 10 years older than I, and our birthdays were the same day. It was an uncomfortable bond. She found it titillating to have a teenager living in the house, sharing all meals and trips and habits. I thought her intimations were weird and I kept my psychic distance.

Libby instructed me on the politics of Bangladesh, on the ease of making Charlotte Russe, on the traditions of Friday night Shabbat dinner, and on travel tips in India. What she showed me was the strains of motherhood: not finishing the dissertation, who gets up at night, how to keep baby fat off, and what to say to a 19-year-old staring at you every morning over coffee.

Here’s what I learned: young mothers are unhappy, difficult to please, still ambitious, vulnerable to criticism, yearning for flirtation, exhausted, and caught in a situation only partially of their own making.

Here’s what Libby gave me: Buckminster Fuller for a dinner partner, an elegant Christmas Party (yes, Jews give Christmas Parties) to which I could invite my scrungy college friends, a home away from home, an appreciation of Indian art, a yearning to go back to school, and a goal to avoid young wifedom and motherhood.

Here are the results: I never did build a geodesic dome, I didn’t marry a Jew because he wouldn’t agree to a Christmas Tree, I never made it to India, I finished college (dropped semester notwithstanding), and I became a young wife and mother (see 22 and 25). Are young people able to learn anything? Yes, but not by instruction, only by trying it for themselves.

Oh yes, the Charlotte Russe. Still dazzling. Still marvelously easy to make. The dessert smart women make.