I am not I: What if I had never gone to Cambridge?

In 1987, I was at university at Hunter College in New York City and was miserable. It was not at all what I had imagined college would be like. I had few friends, fewer dates and no partners in crime, whether intellectual or fun. I spent most weekends at home or on the Greyhound bus hurtling through New England, visiting high school friends who had gone on to lovely small colleges with lots of cute boys and cafeterias. At each of these places I plunged into the extended lives of my old friends with an enthusiasm bordering on desperation. I sung in their choirs, went to their parties, lived in their dorm rooms and drank with their friends. One place, Brandeis, accommodated me so entirely that some people actually believed I went to school there. And the friends I made the first weekend I visited stayed my friends for years, and a couple of them are among my most beloved friends even now.

So I had a choice. I needed to leave Hunter and I decided that I could do a junior year abroad, or transfer to Brandeis. In the end, I did a junior year abroad at Pembroke College Cambridge, and met Ed in the first few days of that year. But what if I had transferred to Brandeis? There was a boy there whom I loved (who hadn’t really loved me back at first but was beginning to come round to the idea). There was one of my best friends from high school. I had already set up dances there, roadied for their concerts (Psychedelic Furs!). We talked about what house we would get if I were accepted. I would have been among friends from the first moment. I would have graduated from a first class university. I would have grown to know Boston more, perhaps connected to my fun (if insane) relatives there. What if…

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again, that there’s not a whole lot of difference between a lapsed Catholic and a Jew — we both function on pure guilt. It drives us, pushes us not only to do the dishes, but to smile at the old lady who lives next door. So me and the husband, we have a lot in common, not least our shared disinclination to work for a living and our guilt about it.

I used to joke that I’d inherited two tempers, one fiery and fierce, but quickly extinguished, from my Sicilian father, the other smoldering and sullen, and hard to put out, from my Irish mother. I wonder if our daughter will have a double helping of guilt, the buried Catholic fear that as we were born in sin, so we live to sin and there’s not much hope of redemption really, at least not on the suffering earth – and the basic Jewish guilt that your mother’s none too pleased with how you’ve spent the afternoon. Oy vey, but that’s a lot to heap on one girl’s shoulders. Likely she can handle it, of course.

Maybe it’s time to head to Florida for a little sun. Maybe it’s time for a really large brunch. Maybe it’s time to make a little trouble. Or maybe it’s time to… hmm. Sometimes I still think about England and the summer I spent there. I wonder if I will ever go back. I wonder what I will think if I do.

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