Page 45 of Bad Words

I sat very still. I unfocused my vision and let some part of me retreat into a cage in the center of my body.

“Why not?” I asked.

“What?” said my father.

“Why won’t you pay two hundred thousand dollars for an English degree, even though you’re perfectly happy to pay the same amount for prelaw?”

“Selina, you can’t be asking that seriously,” said my mother. “Prelaw at Columbia gets you into a top law school, and then, there you are. That’s a good job. A stable career.”

“So the issue is that you don’t think I can find a stable career in an English-related field.”

“What stable career is there? What? Writing a book?” She laughed. “Writing advertisements or scripts for TV anchors? We don’t want you to be scraping and struggling and unable to build a life when you’re twice the age you are now!”

“But you’re assuming that’s what’ll happen. Even though tens of thousands of people have jobs exactly like the ones you just wrote off, and have normal lives, even if they don’t make two hundred thousand dollars a year. You’re assuming it’s not going to happen for me.”

“Why are you assuming it will happen?” my father said. “There are fifty applicants for every one job in—what is it you want to do, publishing?”

“Journalism.”

Both of my parents shut their eyes as though I’d said “terrorism.”

“I’m not being arrogant for wanting to do this,” I said. My voice was beginning to strain. “I’m not being presumptuous for—for having an interest, or for listening to my professors when they tell me I have a valuable perspective.”

“‘A valuable perspective!’” my mother burst out. “You know who has a valuable perspective? A lawyer with a good degree and the influence to make other people listen to their perspective!”

I sat, rigid, trying to tell myself that we had different cultural frames of reference. I tried to remind myself that they were pragmatic to a fault, and that when I’d received my Columbia acceptance, the expectation of a high-powered future had been bundled into their delight. I’d blindsided them. I knew that. But I knew, too, that if I never tried to follow this path, I’d regret it forever.

“I’m not changing my mind,” I said.

“I mean it, Selina.” My father’s face looked as hard and brittle as fired clay. He looked like me. “We won’t be part of this.”

“Fine.”

They watched me stalk toward the hall, fishing my car keys from my jacket pocket. I was at the door when my mother declared, “We’ll be here when you’re ready to admit you’re wrong. Though, with you, God knows if that will ever happen.”

I would remember those words for the rest of my life. The accusation was a perfect snare. Clawing my way through my early twenties, I would rather have died than crawl back to my parents and tell them that I’d made a terrible mistake. Yet I had to lie there at night, remembering my mother’s words, and acknowledge that no matter what I did, she had still found a way to be right about me, about my stubbornness, my silence.

True to their word, from that moment on, they didn’t pay another cent toward my tuition. Naively, I’d thought that after the cutoff, Columbia would consider me independent, and I could get help from the financial aid office. I was wrong. On paper, I was still assumed to have access to my parents’ combined salary of $170,000. My application for a dependency override, which would have removed their income from the picture, was rejected, because I had no evidence of an abusive childhood.

And so I took on eighty-two thousand dollars of student debt to finish my last three semesters. They were a bloodshot blur of work-study hours, shifts at an off-campus job, and caffeinated all-nighters. I stayed in New York during breaks to work. My parents sent innumerable texts and novella-length emails begging me to reconsider, long after reconsidering was a feasible option—begging, as though they weren’t still the ones with every ounce of power over my life. Even stranger to me was that their pain seemed real. They seemed to be undergoing a mourning process for a person I’d never planned to be.

They didn’t attend my graduation, which came as no surprise. By graduation we were barely speaking.

Well into my late twenties, my relationship with my parents had been a source of deep angst and extensive therapy. These days, I could at least understand the knee-jerk worry they’d experienced about my future. Watching the brilliant writers around me lose their jobs, go back to school at thirty-five or forty, retrain in some other, more stable discipline, I understood.

Still, I felt that the connective tissue between my parents and me had atrophied fourteen years ago. Our periods of attempted closeness had resulted in endless friction. Their stilted responses to descriptions of my work. My short temper at their enthusiasm over my cousins’ bright futures. But the periods of polite semi-distance—impersonal birthday greetings and holiday script recitation—had made me twice as miserable.

Even this attempt of theirs to reconnect made me feel heavy and empty, like a steel box. Cleaner to hold some things at arm’s length.

I stood too quickly. Dizzy, I swept a book from my nightstand and went for the door, leaving my phone behind.

It was nine thirty on a Thursday night, and the Slippery Cork, my neighborhood dive, was half-empty. The bar had installed its usual wooden Santa by the door. This was an eight-foot-high statue with violently rosy cheeks, its blue eyes round and staring, its mouth open in what was probably meant to imply a “Ho ho ho!” But when taken all together, the expression suggested that Santa had seen some dread horror not meant for human eyes.

“Nadia,” I said to the bartender as I took my usual stool beside the taps, “have you ever considered just putting up a tree? Some ornaments?”

“No,” said Nadia, taking my favorite gin down from the back wall. She was in her fifties, red-haired, with a nose ring and a smoker’s rasp. “People love Haunted Santa.”

“You should put him up at Halloween and do something normal for Christmas.”