sort of distraction from my studies. During holiday breaks and over the summer,
though, he came home to stay with his mom on the far southwest side of the city
and drove over almost every day to pick me up in his car.
David was easygoing and also more of an adult than any boyfriend I’d had.
He sat on the couch and watched ball games with my father. He joked around
with Craig and made polite conversation with my mom. We went on real dates,
going for what we considered upscale dinners at Red Lobster and to the movies.
We fooled around and smoked pot in his car. By day at the bookbindery, we glue
gunned our way into a companionable oblivion, wisecracking until there was
nothing left to say. Neither of us was particularly invested in the job, beyond
trying to save up money for school. I’d be leaving town soon anyway, and had
little intention of ever coming back to the bookbinding plant. In a sense, I was
already half departed—my mind flown off in the direction of Princeton.
Which is to say that on the early August evening when our father-daughter-
boyfriend trio finally pulled off Route 1 and turned onto the wide leafy avenue
leading to campus, I was fully ready to get on with things. I was ready to cart my
two suitcases into the summer-session dorm, ready to pump the hands of the
other kids who’d come (minority and low-income students primarily, with a few
athletes mixed in). I was ready to taste the dining-hall food, memorize the
campus map, and conquer whatever syllabi they wanted to throw my way. I was
there. I had landed. I was seventeen years old, and my life was under way.
There was only one problem, and that was David, who as soon as we
crossed the state line from Pennsylvania had begun to look a little doleful. As we
wrestled my luggage out of the back of my dad’s car, I could tell he was feeling
lonely already. We’d been dating for over a year. We’d professed love, but it was
love in the context of Euclid Avenue and Red Lobster and the basketball courts
at Rosenblum Park. It was love in the context of the place I’d just left. While my
father took his customary extra minute to get out of the driver’s seat and steady
himself on his canes, David and I stood wordlessly in the dusk, surveying the
immaculate diamond of green lawn outside my stone fortress of a dorm. It was
hitting us both, I assumed, that there were perhaps important things we hadn’t
discussed, that we had perhaps divergent views on whether this was a temporary
farewell or an outright, geographically induced breakup. Were we going to visit?
Write love letters? How hard were we going to work at this?
David held my hand in an earnest way. It was confusing. I knew what I
wanted but couldn’t find the words. I hoped that someday my feelings for a man