by Mary Ann McGuigan

Mama is sitting at the kitchen table, still in the clothes she wore to work, moving bills from one pointless pile to another again, figuring out which ones she can put off paying. Leftover meatballs are heating in the sauce she made two days ago and the smell fills the room like a warning to hungry innocents. My mom is Irish, all Irish, the kind who believes seasoning is a sin more offensive than birth control, so her meatballs taste like they’re made from meat the dog rejected, every trace of flavor removed.

My mother wants to know about the letter I got from St. Peter’s College. College is a touchy subject around here. That’s because we can’t afford it. The first time she told me I couldn’t go, she made a lame attempt to sugarcoat it. “The truth is you’re better off without college.” I guess that’s as close as an Irish mother gets to comforting a kid who’s crying so hard she can hardly breathe. I looked at her, stunned, reminded of the time my brother Danny’s line drive smashed into my nose while I watched him play stickball. “It’s far from your ass. You won’t sit on it,” she said, pressing a sour-smelling dishtowel into my face as I leaned backward over the sink, wondering if it wouldn’t be better to bleed out.

            Mama has the radio on, listening to the news on WOR. The announcer is talking about the speech President Johnson made last night about more troops being sent to Vietnam—all about how our country is defending freedom, and she nods in agreement as if it isn’t all horseshit.

Two years ago, in 1965, they said the job of getting rid of the Communists was going to take only about four thousand men. But there are more than four hundred thousand guys over there now. Danny is one of them, and I don’t dare point out to my mother that if he’d finagled his way into college, he wouldn’t be risking his ass in a rice paddy now.

            “The letter was nothing,” I tell her.     

“I’m not changing my mind about college,” she says, looking at me as if I’m someone who can’t quite master the logic of long division—that there’s a limit to how many times you can divide up one little paycheck. “I’m going to need you working full time.”

“I said it was nothing.”          

Mom looks at me, trying to decide if I’m lying. Of course, I am, because my mother likes the truth even less than seasoning. I don’t bother with the truth anymore. She needs me to get a job and help out. Fair enough. But that isn’t even the main reason.

According to my mother’s view of the world—which dates back to the time her mother stepped off the boat from Limerick—college makes no sense for me. I’m a girl. Girls get married. I told her once that I noticed that boys get married too, and she looked away, muttering, “Boys don’t have babies.”

Of course, she and I have yet to explore the mechanics of baby making. As far as she knows, my data on that issue consists of what Sister Mary Claire told us in eighth grade catechism class after school, when she leaned a black-and-white image of a uterus against the blackboard and told us we were approaching the age when contact with boys could result not only in mortal sin but motherhood.

The public-school kids all liked Sister Mary Claire, and we didn’t want to make fun of her, so Theresa Carpone—who’d been fucking her boyfriend Frankie regularly since sixth grade—finally told her she had the picture upside down.

The way things are going, I’m sure I’ll be pecking at a typewriter before long. No matter how many As I rack up on report cards, my mother’s convinced I shouldn’t hope for anything better than cooking some guy’s meals and having his kids. She calls it running a household, says it’s something a woman can be proud of. I wouldn’t know, because there’s never been a lot to be proud of around here, except my brother Danny. At least he’s dodging bullets for his country. My father spends most of his time drinking. He lives on his own, now that he forfeited his rights to my mother’s maid services.

I want to go to college. I want books, words, stories. Without them, everything hurts much more. But I don’t know how to make it happen. The more my classmates talk about the schools they’ve been accepted to, what they’ll major in, the more I see how trapped I am, caught in a place where my mother’s hopelessness rules. I don’t want to give up, but maybe my dad has the right idea. Stop trying for anything better. Type memos for some insurance company all day and be some guy’s servant all night. I’m never going to change my mother’s mind anyway, because it isn’t just about the cost. It’s about her deciding who I get to be—what I can wear, who I can be friends with, what I can think. The only way I get to be anything else is behind her back.  

The hard part is waking up in the morning, when I can’t crowd out the scraps of dreams that hang on even in the harsh morning light, images of a different me—late for class, running toward a building that seems so far away, thick textbooks heavy in my arms, arriving just in time, finding my place.