“What do you mean ‘another year’?” Her voice went taut.
“I want to keep on working at the nonprofit and see where that goes.”
“You’re never going to have any real success if you don’t get an advanced degree!”
“I didn’t say I wasn’t going to go to graduate school at some point; I’m just saying law school isn’t it.”
“You don’t know what you want.” The children’s screaming had died down, replaced by the high pitch of her voice.
“It’s not your life. When do I get to start my own?”
“You’re right. It’s not my life—it’s yours, and when you ruin it, help yourself since my opinion means nothing.”
I once heard a story about a baby elephant that lived tied up in the zoo with only a few feet of space to walk. One day, when he was older, he was let loose from his chains, but he kept to that small square to which he was accustomed. He did not know he was full-grown now and that if he could only imagine his own power, he could trample the entire place to smithereens. I wondered whether, in this story, the elephant were me or my mother.
“You think this is going to make you happy?” she asked. “You don’t know what happiness is. I have sacrificed so much for you. I haven’t had my own life at all. You think happiness is freedom and discovery and doing whatever pops in your mind? Hyeseung-a, let me tell you something: happiness is what unexceptional people tell themselves they’re looking for when they don’t have the talent and drive to go after real success. Go be poor, then, and tell me from your shack if what you have is happiness.”
“There are lots of ways to succeed, Umma.”
“This is a sure-fire way to succeed, so why not try? Why do you insist on being unhappy?” “Why” was a whine, a yawp, a complaint. “Why can’t you see there are so many people who would kill to have this opportunity and they’re not talking about happiness! Happiness is a mirage—”
I hung up. A moment later, I began to sob, my chest crumbling. She had given me life and then wanted it back to pay for the expenditure of her own. For the first time, I was living the outlines of a satisfying and simple life, but Umma was afraid—was the fear of America? Or of me? I heard the door to the apartment open; Lucinda was home. I tried to stop crying, but couldn’t for a long time. A migraine set in and I closed my eyes. When I woke, I looked up train times to Cold Spring.
The hike up the peak took two hours. When I reached the vista, I sat in a clearing in the brush.
Looking out onto the green-forested valley below, I considered the path I had taken up and the many millions of dreams in life I would never follow. Some paths were open to me, others would close at different points, and many I would feel were not permitted me, as if I were an elephant in a cage. I saw this limitation of imagination was one of nurturing, and I thought again of my mother of many talents. My talent, if I had any, she had given me. If talents were coins, she had not gotten to use hers throughout her life, and it was as if she had pulled some from her pocket and told me, “Hold on to them. They are valuable.” But wasn’t a talent a coin to spend? It only came to fruit if it was out of your hand and working in the world. I first thought about my art, which I kept from my parents, whose dismissal I could not bear. And then I recalled my time in the philosophy department and my classmates who had been allowed to follow their assumptions, even to the wrong conclusion, and given space to challenge others so that they could stretch. But challenging my parents felt like betrayal, as if I were killing them, and I did not want to be a murderer.
I’ll remember this palette for as long as I live, I thought. Above the trees was brushed the cool blue slate of the sky and in the middle, the dying orange line of the sun. As the line thinned, the two halves of the sky stitched themselves together again, and it was time to descend. From rock to rock I leapt, watching for the trail blazes as I had when I had gone up. It took me a little longer to meet the trailhead, because sometimes coming back to something is harder than leaving it.
By the time I reached the foot of the mountain, I knew I would do what my mother wanted.
PART VII
VERITAS
1.
HARVARD LAW SCHOOL’S CLASS OF 2005 was composed of five hundred first-year law students, or 1Ls. The massive class was divided into sections of about eighty students in an effort to foster intimacy and faculty interaction: a small law school within a large law school. Each 1L section took their classes together—Contracts, Criminal Law, Civil Procedure, Torts, Property, and a legal writing workshop.
On orientation weekend, Nate moved me into my apartment in Somerville, the town north of the law school, which was cheaper than Cambridge and housed grad students, nonprofit workers, and hard-partying Tufts students. I paid $600 a month for my room and had four roommates. Compared to me with my books, furniture, and clothes, Nate owned practically nothing. It had only taken him an hour to pack his room in grad school and erase himself from that space.
The night before he flew back to Montana, we visited our friend Jamie Olson, who now lived in Boston. Jamie hadn’t mellowed since Princeton, still speaking his bare naked truth no matter what. He didn’t know why Nate was putting his life on hold for his parents. “If my parents were sick, they wouldn’t want me to be affected.”
“So you wouldn’t take care of them?” I asked, incredulous.
“No, I would expect them to hire someone to do it and if I wanted, I would visit them.”
I didn’t know what to say. Life didn’t ever seem to be anything but living for other people.
After dropping Nate at the airport, I returned to campus, where I purchased my textbooks, which were all written by my professors and had gilded leather bindings like Bibles. In the bookstore and at the student center, 1Ls fluttered. In the air was the same nervous, nearly sexual energy of college orientation years ago. It was the same energy, except now we were adults.
That evening, my section gathered in a lecture hall to watch To Kill a Mockingbird, an orientation activity organized by the administration: an effort to be a fun law school within a serious law school. It was the last time we’d relax as a class for the entire year. Meanwhile, on the other side of the continent, Nate began his new life prepping meals, administering medications, and shuttling his parents to chemotherapy. I missed him and worried that his life was on hold because of freedom and duty, which were opposite sides of love, with Jamie calling heads and Nate tails. I didn’t know how people lived with that truth and didn’t want to die.
Boston was four hours north of New York, similar to the distance between Houston and Dallas, so naturally I expected Beantown to be a more accommodating version of New York. I was wrong. For one thing, its winter was different in kind. As I walked my bike from the library toward my apartment at midnight, the swiftly falling snow collecting in mounds in the panniers attached to my back wheel, and the whole world mute with the dampening snow, I played back the conversation I’d had with Umma my last year in college.
“When you go to law school, you’ll see how stimulated you are by everyone else. It’ll be a dream,” rang her words. “Just try.”
Just try. I had reached for the shiny red apple, never reckoning the cost of a bite.
The cost was actually easily quantifiable. It was $50,000 in annual tuition, books, a computer, rent, and a bike to get around school. My parents had taken out low-interest loans financed by Princeton to send me there, and I myself held $30,000 in undergraduate debt. But my parents did not expect to subsidize law school. Because they were raising my siblings and lived at a distance, they didn’t support in nonmonetary ways either. When I was sick, was Umma there to take care of me? I thought in thick self-pity when I came down with a sniffle. “Just try” had made the endeavor sound so easy, so cheap, but Harvard Law School was hard and expensive.
As for the work itself, it was interesting, but the interest was incommensurate with the effort. Again, it never occurred to me to put in minimal exertion. Conforming to standard 1L practice, I read my case law with different-colored highlighters—yellow for facts, green for precedent, pink for legal question, orange for disposition, blue for dissent—and formatted, and reformatted, my course outlines. While I was never swept up by the material—observing with anthropological fascination as my friends filled their scant free time debating policy implications of Crim Law cases or opining which Supreme Court Justice would be the hardest to clerk for—the intensity required by 1L year brought me to an appreciation of the law and how human it was. So many times it overwhelmed its boundaries, slipping from clear application of rules to second-order questions of justice, or what ought to be done.
“If you had all the money in the world and could do anything, what would you do?” I had asked Nate once during a lost moment before sleep. He was so close I could smell his hair, which didn’t smell of himself but his shampoo, as if he were a theory and not a person.
“Exactly the same thing I’m doing now,” he said, confused.
During my first weeks at Harvard, I often recalled this short exchange, a reminder that, once again, I had filled my life with oughts and rules instead of dreams. In the meantime, my classmates fielded professors’ cold calls. Showing themselves thirsty and self-directed, my peers, I knew, would do great things in the world in which they were interested. I tried to extend the parity to myself and recognize that I also had talents. Didn’t I deserve to have a dream and pursue it, too?
The dream was only an outline, defined by the shapes around it, shapes I’d taken and sloughed off, including law school. It was also inscribed by my experience in Joe Russo’s sculpture class, which in its remoteness now appeared sacred. What a representation of the living meant in nuts-and-bolts actuality was yet a mystery. I wanted to leave school altogether, get a job, tease the truth into reality. But I was not ready. I still felt I had to justify my life to my parents, to execute what they told me I ought. To understand why I was so compelled, I turned to philosophy again, as if it were my religion.
That was how in the first semester of 1L year while my classmates were plunged in their Bluebooks, I rode the Red Line to its end and trudged across a parking lot in the waxing mist of the early winter to an office building where I took the GRE in a low-walled cubicle. For weeks, I crafted personal statements, gathered recommendations, and applied to PhD programs in philosophy.
Law school had been about answering oughts. If New York, the other pole, had been about art-making, freedom, and all the experiences I could have until the dream took shape, then philosophy would be the third way, the compromise.
2.
IT WAS SPRING BREAK, RAIN tore through a slit in the sky, and for days, the world wept effortlessly while I managed to squeeze out a couple of tears from each eye.
