Because My Boyfriend Got Somebody Else Pregnant, I Decided to Go to College
My friend Stacy was headed to freshman orientation, and it was 1985 on a day in May and the Midwest sky was showing off and Stacy was getting ready to pull out and the days stretched before me, empty and long, so I said yes and rode shotgun a hundred miles or so north out of our hometown. She snuck me into the dorm room, shoving my purse under the bunkbed while I looked for a pay phone to call my mom.
On the way up, we decided it was time for me to stop making out with our assistant manager at the steakhouse where we all worked. There were only so many times I could step out of the walk-in cooler and tuck in my shirt before the shock value wore off. The night before, he’d wrapped my wrists together with duct tape and put Jell-O down my shirt. There were three of us closing, one to watch. He was just being funny, right? Neither of us knew for sure. We were kidding around when it started, but then something shifted and I thought of how hard I fought him when he wrestled me down, how helpless I felt with my hands behind my back, how my skin tore when he finally pulled the tape off. He was really sorry about that part. Right?
And worse, it was becoming even more depressingly clear that my now ex-boyfriend was much more interested in his future plans of baby booties and boot camp than whatever I might be doing with our assistant manager who just happened to be, of course, his friend. Given the duct tape and the Jell-O and the fact the ex-boyfriend forgot how he used to be so full of jealousy he’d pull me out of parties so determinedly he’d leave black-stamp bruises on the back of my arms, it was time to move on.
But where? My mother’s depression had sprinted past the melancholy of my childhood and shifted into despair. In the evenings, she sat in the dark, inches from the lamp my father turned on when he came home, hours after dinner. I stopped asking if she was okay. I was four when I first decided it was my job to make her better. By the time I turned fourteen, I decided I was done. I rarely came home. I was angry at her, although I couldn’t have said why exactly. It’s too easy to say I didn’t understand clinical depression, although I didn’t. Perhaps I saw in her a longing and desperation that too closely mirrored my own. Both of us not knowing what could fill the void within us. It only occurs to me now that the year I stopped trying to fix my mother, I moved on to a series of boys who needed fixing.
If it had been a different year, my mother might have asked about my college plans. She liked to tell people that her girls were going to college—Even if it’s just a year, even if it’s just for me, I told them they have to try it—but this year no one mentioned it, even though my sister was away at school. I was raised to be independent. From the time I was five, my father let me pick my bedtime because “I knew best what I needed,” and I’d been working since I was fifteen, but I don’t remember anyone asking about my plans, although they might have and, to be fair, I wouldn’t have told them anyway. My mother would have worried I’d be “living in sin.” My father would have just worried. And I would have done anything to prevent my father from worrying.
But it no longer mattered. All of my plans included the brown-eyed boy with the baby on the way. I’d go where he went and work while he went to school. And why not? I wasn’t particularly good at anything. He was brilliant and poor and abused, driven in ways I wasn’t. I underwhelmed all of my teachers. My mother liked to say I didn’t try and that was true, but I also had no idea why I should or what I might be capable of achieving. I had no marketable skills, no burning interests beyond the books that periodically arrived at the library in our small town. I couldn’t imagine a life where I wasn’t taking someone’s order.
That day, I stood beside Stacy in line where she waited to register for classes. When it was her turn, the advisor, a woman my mother’s age with the same sort of “sensible” Midwest haircut, motioned us both into her office. I sat in the windowless gray room and tried not to look interested in the courses Stacy was considering.
When she handed Stacy her schedule, she asked where I was going. I told her I didn’t have any plans and she said, frowning, “What’s your GPA? Your ACT?” Neither were particularly impressive, but she handed me a form and admitted me on the spot. I registered for classes and took home an invoice. “Take a minute to think about which dorm you’ll be most comfortable in,” she told us as we left. “Some girls find living too closely to boys is distracting to their studies.”
Stacy and I laughed on our way to the car. Of course, we wanted the co-ed dorm, although Stacy’s boyfriend might not like it. But me? I was completely available, open to anything in a way I’d never be again after I’d move to campus and drink in Plath and Piercy, Walker and Atwood. I’d swallow knowing whole and let it shape me in ways I couldn’t imagine I’d welcome or want.
“That’s the advantage of being cheated on and dumped,” I told Stacy then, not realizing the true gift I’d been given. “All those guys out there, just waiting.”
Laurie Rachkus Uttich’s (@laurieuttich; laurieuttich.com) prose and poetry have been published in Brevity; Creative Nonfiction; Fourth Genre; Iron Horse Literary Review; JuxtaProse; The Missouri Review: Poem of the Week; Poets and Writers; Rattle; River Teeth; Ruminate; The Sun; Superstition Review; Sweet: A Literary Confection; Terrain.org; and others. Her poetry collection, Somewhere, a Woman Lowers the Hem of her Skirt, is forthcoming from Riot in Your Throat Press (May, 2022). She teaches at the University of Central Florida and leads creative writing workshops at a maximum-security correctional center for men in Orlando.