Fall, 1980
When I was 16, I left Houston for boarding school in Massachusetts. This wasn’t something that kids really did down in Texas, and I had to explain repeatedly that I wasn’t being sent to reform school, or a military academy.
“I’m going away to prep school,” I’d say, trying to sound superior, only to be inevitably met with “Preppy school? What is preppy school?” The Official Preppy Handbook had made a big impact among my friends, but none of them quite grokked the term’s origins.
In fact, few people around me—my mom being the notable exception— understood my desire to leave home, or my choice of destination. “If you had a boyfriend, you wouldn’t want to go away,” my dad said a few weeks before I left. This was perhaps not strictly untrue, but definitely an unkind thing to observe out loud, and besides, I had other goals for leaving—primary among them to get away from him. My dad liked to drink, and once my parents split up he no longer took pains to hide that fact. He was mean when he was drunk, and it was a bad scene. I took it especially hard, and begged him often to quit, which of course only made the situation worse.
I was beyond ready for a change—too ready, in fact, to be nervous or scared about this big new chapter of mine not working out. I once read that people who act in ways that are perceived as brave often do those things because they don’t feel like they have another option. That very much describes me at that time. The Williston-Northampton School had to be better than Houston, I would accept no other outcome.
when I arrived on campus that September, I had many fantasies regarding what my prep school life would be like. It didn’t take long for quite a few of them to deflate. I dreamt, for one, of becoming an athlete. Playing sports was required of us, and I saw myself running cross country in the fall, learning to ski in the winter, and playing lacrosse in the spring. I had run every day all summer in preparation, but I lasted on the cross country team exactly one day. Unlike pancake-flat Houston, Western Massachusetts had hills, and I was completely unprepared to scale them at anything faster than a walk.
I tried—and failed—to learn to ski that winter, sticking to the bunny slope for so many days that I annoyed by friend Nicole, who insisted I was ready for an intermediate-level trail. We rode the chairlift up and Nicole whooshed ahead, braked, and turned back at me effortlessly. Her parents owned a ski resort in New Hampshire and she was skilled. I was still at the top of the trail, highly reluctant to move. Finally, embarrassed by the scene, I attempted to ski the trail, and wiped out immediately. I tried again, to the same effect. Then I just removed the skis, and walked down the rest of the hill.
Predictably, lacrosse didn’t go much better.
