Paris Adieu #featured #Wattys2017

Chapter 1 - Escape

The year I turned nineteen I came down with lack-of-plan-itis. It was a long- drawn-out illness with no apparent end in sight; made worse by constant solicitous inquiries from family and friends of family.

"Ava! Nice to see you. Home from school?"

I'd shrug, hoping they'd get the message to lay off. Mostly they didn't.

"Not at school? What are you up to then?" neighbors out tending their lawns would ask in one form or another as I passed their houses on my way to the home where I grew up, on a horseshoe-shaped drive in West Hartford, Connecticut.

I was working as a cashier at a twenty-four hour self-service gas station, which I didn't really feel like talking about, so I cut back on visiting my grandparents to escape the non-stop questions before I made it into their house. Once I was inside, things got even worse. My grandmother would punctuate her stone-cold silences with snappy references to the year's worth of college tuition they'd just thrown away on me at music college where I'd been studying to become a music teacher until I'd dropped out.

It wasn't my fault their plans hadn't been mine. I'd been trying to hint at that all along, but the symphony of my grandmother's own perfectly-laid goals for my life had drowned out the tiny tinkling of whatever ideas of my own had been struggling toward being heard. They held the moneybags and I didn't. That was the gist of most of my grandmother's lectures. It was hell not to have a plan at age nineteen.

I'd screwed up since finishing high school in Maine - and that was after I'd screwed up beginning high school at a private school in Connecticut where my grandparents had first sent my mother and then me. But I wasn't a screw-up. I just didn't know where I fit in. I was neither here nor there, and the place I inhabited in the middle wasn't exactly right either.

I loved ninth grade at the all-girls' private school. But at home there'd been endless fights and negotiations with my grandmother . "This is my house and you'll do as I say as long as you live in it" didn't offer much room for maneuver. We sparred over why I couldn't wear blue jeans. "Young ladies do not wear blue jeans." How I should wear my hair."Nancy Shelton told me the other day you could be such a pretty girl if only you'd stop hiding your eyes with that shaggy hair in your face." As well as why I couldn't do just about anything else a normal teenage girl might want to do in the late twentieth century.

Finally I got shipped up to Maine to stay with my aunt and uncle for my remaining high school years. I'd made the best of it and graduated fourth in my class at a public high school Down East (that's the area along Maine's coast from Penobscot Bay to the Canadian border) then returned to Connecticut to attend music college where I'd fancied myself some sort of budding concert pianist. It didn't take longer than one week of classes to know I lacked both the talent and focus to consider a performing career at the keyboard. By spring semester even my piano teacher, a vivacious Pole who bounced and grunted on the piano bench when she performed, suggested kindly to me that I might have more strengths as a writer than a pianist, after reading yet another of my well-thought-out notes explaining why I had not been prepared for our lesson. The simple fact was I didn't have the concentration necessary to sit around and practice a Bach fugue or any other piece of music hour after hour, day after day. I was too distracted by the whole, wide world out there, waiting for me to discover.

At the end of my first year I dropped out. My grandparents wanted me to become a music teacher, but I wasn't the teacher-type. Who wanted to put up with nasty public school children who might not want to be in a music class anyway? One of two things I took away from music college was that teaching surly junior high schoolers would be a surefire way to lose one's love of music. The other was that I wasn't a specialist. I was a generalist. Liberal arts colleges were created for people like me.