I was eighteen, a freshman at Rutgers University where my father was a renowned and beloved English professor. Rutgers had recently started to accept women and I was guilted and bribed to apply and attend. Also, my math scores on the SAT were so low it’s possible I was given the sign-your-name credit and nothing more. I was not faced with a plethora of choices but when I said I wanted to go the the University of Wisconsin in Madison where my sister had found paradise and when I visited, we got stoned and ate freshly baked doughnuts at three o’clock in the morning, my mom said it would break my father’s heart. This heart had already been broken by his father’s disappearance, his year in a brutal orphanage and some lousy book sales but I could not bear adding to that heart’s damage. Also, as the daughter of a faculty member my tuition was free.
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