and that’s final!”
Dinah’s heart was pounding so hard she could hardly breathe, but she kept looking at him with outward calm and said, “What if I don’t?”
Her mother hastily interceded. “Dinah, you have your whole lifetime ahead of you! We simply want to make sure you have the grounding you need to succeed. You’re too good a student to quit now….”
“If you don’t go, you’ve had the last penny of support from us,” her father roared.
“Are you going to tell me what I have to major in, too?” she yelled back. “What if I go for Women’s Studies?”
“You know that’s not…” her mother started to say.
He bellowed some more. Dinah jumped up and fled to her room, so upset she was ready to throw some clothes in a bag and take off. Susan’s and Christina’s parents were too conventional to let her stay with them, but she bet Monique’s mom wouldn’t care if she moved in until graduation. She could get a part-time job to supplement her summer’s earnings and help buy groceries.
She’d actually started grabbing clothes from a drawer when there was a soft knock on her door.
“Who is it?”
“May I come in?” her mother asked.
After a moment she sank down onto the bed, hugging an armful of shirts to her chest. “It’s your house.”
Opening the door, her mother said mildly, “I’ve always respected your right to privacy.”
Tears prickled in Dinah’s eyes. “I know you have.”
“May I sit down?”
She nodded.
They sat side by side for a long moment.
“Honey, I know you’re sure cooking is what you want to do with your life. Your dad…well, he just doesn’t see it as a profession. He thinks short-order cook.”
She rolled her eyes. “If he’d just educate himself…”
“Let me say my piece. You’re seventeen…. Yes, almost eighteen.” She waited while Dinah started to protest what she knew was coming—you’re too young to make smart decisions for yourself, blah, blah, blah— then subsided. Mom started just as she’d anticipated. “We all think we know what’s best when we’re your age, but most of us find out somewhere along the way that we were wrong.”
There was something just a little sad in her mother’s voice that made Dinah ask tentatively, “Did you?”
“If you mean, do I wish I hadn’t married your father, no.” She laughed a little. “Despite his occasional bullheadedness. But I hate my job, and I hate knowing I could do better than the men I work for. So yes. I was sure at eighteen that all I wanted to do was get married and have a family. Now I wish I’d gotten an education first. I wish I’d majored in business. I’m thinking about starting to take some classes.”
“Really?” Dinah asked in surprise. She was ashamed to realize that her mother’s grumbles about her job had just been background noise to her. She hadn’t really listened. “That’s great!” she said. “Is Daddy okay with it?”
“He’s the one who’s been encouraging me. It’s taken me a few years to see he’s right.”
Dinah blinked. “Daddy?” Her father was willing to surrender some of his creature comforts, maybe even some income if Mom cut back to part-time, so that she could find more personal satisfaction in what she did?
Seeing how stunned Dinah looked, her mother shook her head. “You don’t listen to him any more than he does to you. You’re both bullheaded.” She hesitated. “Whether you’re willing to see it or not, the truth is, he wants what’s best for you. He’s just convinced he knows better than you what that is.”
Dinah grimaced. “I noticed.”
“You and Will both talk as if college is like being on a chain gang. Everybody I know who went thinks those four years were the best years of their lives.”
“But I don’t want to be a teacher, or…or…”
“Most of what you learn in college isn’t vocational. Would it be so awful to develop analytical skills, or become a better writer? Maybe more informed about world events?”
“I’ve been in school for thirteen years.”
“College isn’t like high school. And there’s no reason, even if you go to a state school, you couldn’t live in the dorm. You’d be independent, without actually having to pay the bills or cook and clean.”
She’d thought her parents would expect her to commute to classes to save money. That it would be another four years just like high school.
Still…it would be four more years.
She said slowly, “What if we made a deal? What if I agree to go to college for two years, and then if I’m still sure I want to go to culinary school instead, you and Daddy would let me do that?”
There was a moment of silence.
Excited by her idea, she continued, “I’d be twenty then, not eighteen. You’d been married a whole year by the time you were twenty. So Daddy couldn’t argue that I wasn’t ready to decide what I wanted to do with my life.”
“No, he couldn’t, could he?” her mother murmured.
“Doesn’t that seem fair?” She held her breath, waiting for an answer.
“Yes.” Her mother nodded, at first a small bob of her head, then a more decisive dip. “Yes. I’ll talk to your father. But it sounds like a deal to me.”
Dinah wrote to Will about the situation.
Daddy agreed, so I’ve applied to both San Francisco State and the University of San Francisco. My parents winced at that, because tuition is so high at private colleges, but I’ve applied for a bunch of scholarships, too. At least I know getting into S.F. State won’t be a problem. I don’t want to have to go farther away, even to Davis or Chico. I want to be here once you come home.
It was a whole month before she heard back from him, and it didn’t sound as if he’d gotten that letter from her yet, because he referred only to things she’d said earlier.
Flying in, I thought Vietnam was beautiful. Lush and green, laced with brown rivers, these perfect squares of rice paddies and rubber plantations laid out like checkerboards. But, man, it’s hot here. By the time we carried our duffel bags across the tarmac to the truck, we were all dripping wet, it’s that humid. And it stinks. I mean, the whole country, as far as I can tell. I keep asking guys who’ve been here for a while, and they say it’s untreated sewage and rotting vegetation and who the hell knows what else, but this one guy who is on his third tour in-country says it’s death. Bodies rotting. Seems to me he’s enjoying trying to scare us, like an older camper telling ghost stories, but it made my hair stand on end, I gotta tell you.
Dinah called Will’s mother right away to tell her she’d
