It’s not as though my friends were rich. But I know that none of their mothers slept in the living room on a bed that also served as a couch. They mostly lived in nice family neighborhoods like Park Hill or in the better parts of Capitol Hill. Everyone had a shower. A couple of friends had parents who owned ski condos. My friend Matt even had a swimming pool in his backyard, which we turned into a party scene on a few occasions when his folks were out of town. And no one had a mother who spent most of her time protesting and plotting the revolution and who cheered when the president was shot. I didn’t tell my mother I was embarrassed by our modest place, but I think she noticed I wasn’t inviting many friends over.
With Inca in front of our home in Denver, 1982
With my mother behind our home in Denver, 1982
I spent more and more of my time out of the house, coming home whenever I felt like it. As always, there were no rules. It got to the point where it almost seemed as if my mother and I competed over who came home the latest. She noted in her diary: “Peter says I’m too old to stay out so late, that he’s in the prime of his life and is the one that should be coming home in the middle of the night.”
My mother and I still had our old favorite routines together, though, including early-morning weekend waffles. We both liked our breakfasts together, despite the fact that I wasn’t very sociable at that hour: “Breakfast with Peter is both a turn-off and a treat at the same time. He’s reading the sports section of the newspaper and I’m trying to tell him about my dreams.” And we still loved going to the movies, our movie tastes having become more compatible. One December afternoon we watched the movie Reds, about the Russian Revolution, starring Warren Beatty and Diane Keaton. When my mother asked me what I considered to be the meaning of the movie, I told her it was obvious:
“Nothing works, the real revolution will never happen.”
My mother didn’t like that answer. “Well, I thought the movie was great. Not dismissive of revolution at all. It was pro-revolutionary and tried to be realistic and nondogmatic. It tried to give a critical but sympathetic view of the U.S. revolutionaries as well as of the Russians.”
When Joel came to visit a few weeks later, the debate about Reds continued, the first time I could remember getting into a political argument with him. Joel said he hadn’t liked it that a woman (Diane Keaton) was holding a man (Warren Beatty) back from his political work; I countered that the woman’s pleas were justified because the man thought he was the only one making the revolution, and he didn’t take love seriously. My mother said nothing and seemed amused by our back and forth. As she described it in her diary, “I’d love to sit back and hear all three of my sons making meaningful conversation like that, and not have to get involved at all, because each one of them represents a little of me.”
When I needed her to, my mother could play the supportive mother role at school events and even seemed to like it, coming to my plays and choir performances and clapping and cheering with the other proud parents—though rarely interacting with them. She even agreed to type up my papers during the first year of high school as long as I promised to take a typing class the next summer. I watched intently over my mother’s shoulder as she typed up my first term paper, about the history of the samurai sword in Japan, written for my Asian Studies class. I bought a red and white plastic folder to put it in—the East High colors. My mother noticed how engrossed I was in the whole process. She wrote in her diary, “If Peter doesn’t get an ‘A’ for this, it will be a major test of his strength of character.”
My mother never asked what grade I got on that paper; as had always been true, grades were the last thing in the world she cared about. But she did care what I wrote about, often nudging me to choose a political topic, and wanted to see my papers and have the chance to critique or praise them. And as I discovered later, my mother would also comment on them in her diary. An entry about one of my English papers in early 1982 read:
Peter wrote an essay about “These Things Have I Loved,” for his English class, and I’m asking him for a copy. It’s one of his gems—contrasting the joy of being dirty and playing hard in South America with the things that turn him on now, and seeing his life as a process of sharp changes and adjustments, valuable experiences leading up to his present seriousness and concerns for achievement.
But most of the time, I did everything I could to make sure to keep my mother’s world and my school world as far apart from each other as possible. They seemed irreconcilable. The more I fit in at school, the less I felt like I fit with my mother.
Mixing those two worlds sometimes created awkward moments, such as when my friend Rene would come over. He lived with his mother in a high-rise apartment complex just a few blocks away from where we lived. Their place wasn’t that large, but he and his mother each had a bedroom, and they even had cable TV with HBO. Rene and I were on the tennis team together and we both got lead roles in the school musical, but he was far more popular than I was, and girls flocked to him. He was handsome, with short, dark wavy hair, and he had a certain worldly charisma that made his flirting seem effortless. Hanging out with Rene made me feel cool, even as it made me intensely aware that I was far less cool than he was.
My mother was one of the many who seemed charmed by Rene when he came over after tennis practice or theater rehearsals.
One day when he was hanging out in my room, Rene asked me, “Is your mother some sort of communist?”
I hesitated. “What gives you that impression?” I had never told Rene much about my childhood, only that I had spent some time in South America. And I certainly never said anything about my mother’s radical politics.
“Well, all those books in your living room. Marx, Lenin, Engels, Mao, Che—aren’t they all communists?”
“Well, yes, I suppose they are.”
“So is she a communist?”
“Yeah,” I said, shrugging, “but she hates the Soviet Union—she says they aren’t communist enough, that they’re actually capitalist.”
“Wow,” Rene said, grinning. “I’ve never met a real communist before.”
I laughed awkwardly. “I know it might be hard to believe, but she says it’s just a matter of time, that the revolution is inevitable, that history is on her side.”
“Let’s Put a Pencil to It”
ONE LATE FALL day during my senior year, I got home from school, checked the mail pile on the kitchen table, and found a fat envelope addressed to me. I ripped it open before I even took off my coat.
“Dear Peter, We are pleased to inform you . . .”
I didn’t have to read any further. I was in. I pressed the paper to my face and kissed it. The next year I would be going to Tufts University. It was the only school I had applied to, early decision.
The problem was that I had decided to apply to Tufts without consulting either my mother, who had never encouraged college, or my father and Rosalind, who had made it clear that they hoped I’d choose a school in the Midwest. Years earlier, my father had set up college trust funds for all three of his sons. I had no idea if that money would cover Tufts’ tuition. I assumed everything would work out somehow, now that I had gotten in. And besides, I thought, my father should be happy I was actually going to college—my older brothers had simply cashed in their college trust funds when they turned eighteen; they didn’t see the point in going to college. I knew they would scoff at my dream of attending this fancy private school back east (two decades later, Joel would start a late academic career teaching sociology and writing about Mao’s China at the type of elite private East Coast school he had frowned on me attending).
I called my father right away. “I’ve got some good news, I got into Tufts! I’m going to Tufts next year.”
There was a long pause on the other end of the line. “Tufts? Isn’t that a rich kids’ school? Where exactly is Tufts, Peter?”
“It’s near Boston.”
“Ah, Boston. East Coast. That’s pretty far away. Well, let’s talk
about it when we see you at Christmas, okay?”
“Yeah, sure, but I’m going to Tufts,” I insisted, annoyed that my father didn’t even congratulate me.
“How much is the tuition?”
“I’m not exactly sure. They sent me a thick envelope; it’s probably in there.”
“Well, bring what they sent you and we’ll put a pencil to it.”
Going over my college trust fund had become a father-son ritual, which he seemed to enjoy more than I did. Whenever I visited him during the holidays he always brought out a manila folder with my name on it, checked the spreadsheets, and showed me how much the fund had changed in value since my last visit. I could never remember exactly how much was in there, but I always assumed it must be enough to pay for college.
When my mother came home, I told her my news. But from her I was not expecting any big congratulations. “Guess what? I got into Tufts—Tufts University, near Boston.”
“Oh, wow. I didn’t know you had applied there. So I suppose this means it’s official; you really are going to college next year.”
I just nodded and smiled.
“Well, I guess that’s it then,” she said with a sigh. “I hope you’ll be happy.” And then she added: “Carl’s paying for it out of your college trust fund, right?”
“Yeah, don’t worry about that.”
She looked relieved and gave me a hug. “I’ll have to come out and visit you there sometime. I think I have some old friends in the area I can stay with.” My mother projected complete calm about this sea change in our lives, but that night she confessed to her diary: “I am really freaking out at the prospect of seeing Peter go off on his own,” adding, “Peter is nervous about growing up and being alone. So am I.”
* * *
The day after getting the acceptance letter from Tufts, I was eager to get to school. Even if my parents weren’t thrilled for me, I knew that my friends and teachers, especially Mr. Nelson, my English teacher and the faculty sponsor of the student paper, would be impressed that I was going to an East Coast school. For months, all anyone could talk about was who was applying where and what their first choice school was, and it was clear that many of the top students hoped to go to the East Coast. And the college mecca of the East Coast, by all accounts, was a magical-sounding place called Boston.
I did all the research. I was captivated by the glossy pictures in the college brochures of old brick buildings covered in ivy, graceful rowers on the Charles River, and the picturesque bridges that linked Cambridge and Boston. But I didn’t think I would get into Harvard (I had good grades but mediocre test scores) or fit in at MIT. Tufts was the next logical choice, at least according to the college guidebooks I had studied so carefully; it even had a strong international relations program. I had told my mother years earlier that I wanted to study international relations so I could be a diplomat. “Why on earth would you want to be a diplomat?” she’d asked, laughing.
“I like the word ‘diplomat,’ I like how it sounds,” I replied, and she laughed even harder.
I had never been to Tufts, or to Boston, or anywhere else in that part of the country, so I had no idea that being “outside of Boston” in Medford was not quite the same thing as being in Cambridge. Unlike so many of my friends, I’d had no East Coast college tour with my parents. My father, Rosalind, and Grandma Andreas had all hoped that I’d at least consider Bethel College in Kansas, the Mennonite school that almost all of my relatives had attended. My father had also suggested that I could try to use his home address to get in-state tuition at a public university in Michigan. My father was always looking for the best deal—he’d drive to multiple grocery stores to save a few cents on a gallon of milk, or drive out of his way to fill up his tank at the least expensive gas station. He’d surely want to try for the best deal when it came to college for me.
That Christmas, I sat down next to my father in his home office as he took the manila folder from his gray metal filing cabinet. Nothing made my father happier than to sit down with a pencil, calculator, spreadsheet, and a pad of paper, and work out a financial problem—“Let’s put a pencil to it,” he always liked to say. It satisfied him to juggle all the numbers and figure out finances like some sort of math puzzle. My father was an accountant at heart. He was never without his checkbook in his front shirt pocket, even when at home, and boasted that he had saved every check he’d ever written in his entire life. He proudly framed the check (check number 8, January 27, 1944) for the first car he bought: a used 1931 Ford Model A coupe, for $175.
Looking over all the figures in the trust fund spreadsheet and expertly tapping away on his calculator, my father had that quiet confidence of an expert accountant. His desk was covered in neatly stacked papers, leaving just enough room for a few small framed family photos—a color portrait of him and Rosalind taken around the time they were married; a black-and-white portrait of my older brothers and me together when we were little.
Though we’d been going over this spreadsheet together every Christmas for the past several years, my father seemed much less pleased by what he was finding on the page this time.
“That’s a very expensive school,” my father remarked.
“Maybe I can apply for financial aid?” I suggested.
“Absolutely not,” he shot back, as if offended that I would even think of such a thing. “Financial aid is for truly needy families.”
“But it sounds like we are needy,” I persisted, pointing to the spreadsheet.
“No,” he insisted. “Not like other families. We shouldn’t abuse the system like some people do.”
My father was proudly self-reliant, never taking a handout, never even taking a loan from a bank. He hated to use credit cards, always preferring to write a check. “Well, let’s put a pencil to it again,” he said. By the end of the afternoon, with a little extra encouragement from Rosalind, he somehow figured out how to stretch the college funds to cover the tuition.
I was ecstatic. Back at school in Denver after the winter break, I took out the light blue Tufts University sticker that had come with the acceptance letter and proudly pasted it on the back windshield of our light blue VW Rabbit. It was a perfect color match. Somehow that rusting car with balding tires and fading dull paint suddenly seemed a lot fancier.
* * *
Some six months later, my father and Rosalind drove out from Michigan for my high school graduation. I would be driving back with them for the summer, and they would take me to Tufts for the start of the fall semester, like all the other parents.
The day before the graduation ceremony, I went home earlier than my mother had expected and found her in bed with Enoch, a thirty-something security guard from the bank up the street. She introduced me to him awkwardly.
I nodded, and he mumbled a hello, hurriedly got up, put his clothes and holster belt back on, and disappeared out the back door.
“Well, at least you’ll have your own bedroom when I’m gone,” I said to my mother with a grin.
She chuckled. “Yeah, I obviously need it.”
The East High School class of 1983 graduation was held at the Denver Coliseum on a warm June day—a vast space that meant my parents could easily give each other a wide berth. I was just glad they were there. There were no celebratory family pictures taken that day. My mother didn’t own a camera, and my father and Rosalind just gave me a quick hug before leaving the coliseum. I’m sure my father was immensely relieved that he didn’t run into my mother at the ceremony. But avoiding her entirely would not be so easy.
When my father and Rosalind arrived at the house to pick me up and load their red Buick Skyhawk for the long drive east, my mother invited them in for a cup of herbal tea. My parents had not seen each other in eight years, not since the bitter court custody battle. Now, standing at our front door, my father didn’t shake hands with my mother. He didn’t speak to her or even look at her. But following Rosalind’s lead, he reluctantly came inside. We all crammed in around our tiny roun
d kitchen table covered in an olive-green tablecloth, my father sitting as far away from my mother as possible and staring into his teacup. I felt his discomfort, and could not help but feel bad for him. I also felt bad that these two people, who had spent two decades together and produced three children, could not get along well enough to even shake hands or say a word to each other. My mother and Rosalind did all the talking, smiling and making chitchat.
“What a lovely place you have,” Rosalind said, sugarcoating her observations. “It’s so cozy. Is that picture from Pakistan?” she asked.
“It’s so nice that you could come to Peter’s graduation,” my mother said. “It means a lot to him.”
I had wanted this gathering—for all of us to be together in the same place, getting along normally, even for only a few minutes, exchanging superficial pleasantries—but now I wanted it to end as soon as possible. I was impressed that my father had come in and was sitting there politely, in my mother’s kitchen, only a couple of feet away from the woman who, in his view, had stolen his children and wrecked his family. This was surely the last place in the world he wanted to be.
After we stuffed my belongings into the car trunk and backseat, leaving just enough room for me, my father and Rosalind waited in the car while I said good-bye to my mother.
“We’ll go to Europe again sometime,” she said confidently into my ear during our long farewell hug on the front porch, as if to say our adventures together were not over.
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