My father hates goodbyes almost as much as he hates paying for parking.
The day of my flight to Georgetown, he pulled into the drop-off lane at the airport and pressed a twenty into my hand. “Well,” he said. “Good luck.”
The lady at the Delta counter eyed my bulging suitcase as I attempted to hoist it onto the scale.
My bag was 40 pounds overweight.
“That will be $200 ,” she said cheerily.
I started to panic. I had $20 cash, no credit card and my father was already 30 miles down the Suncoast Parkway. Finally the baggage nazi agreed that if I dumped out my suitcase and divided my belonging into two plastic trash bags, I could avoid the fine. Apparently, for Delta, my humiliation was payment enough.
Georgetown was the only school I applied to, and I had never bothered to visit. When I deferred my acceptance for a year to live in Germany, my father developed the paranoid fear that someone in the admissions office would go back over my application and discover that I did not, in fact, deserve to be here.
He nurtured this fear the entire year I was abroad, and thus every piece of University correspondence that arrived in my absence was opened with great apprehension and read aloud to me over the phone as we braced ourselves for the arrival of an letter containing the words, “Dear Ms. Harman, we regret to inform you…”. We had purchased my flight to D.C. the way most people purchase lottery tickets: probably won’t work out, but it can’t hurt to try. Miraculously, my gap year came and went, and Georgetown was still willing to take me.
I arrived in D.C. a full week before freshman move-in. The official reason was to acquaint myself with the city before classes started; the real reason was that once I was there, it would be harder for Georgetown to change its mind.
My only contact in Washington was Mae, a friend I had met while living in a youth hostel. Mae and I had never seen each other on American soil, and the more I thought about it, we had never seen each other sober. She met me at the baggage carousel wearing the foam from a couch cushion decorated to look like a piece of bread. (“So it would be easy for you to spot me!”) Noticing that she couldn’t bend at the waist, I started to wonder how she had managed to drive to the airport in that outfit. Then I remembered that Mae was 15 and couldn’t possibly have a driver’s license. I resolved not to ask how she had gotten herself and the car to the airport.
As fate would have it, Mae drove the car into the front of a dry-cleaners shop later that week, and bring-Sarah-to-college-duties were handed off to my father’s brother, a man I hadn’t seen in 12 years.
That fateful Saturday morning, my uncle and his girlfriend chucked my two plastic trash bags into the car and headed for Reservoir Road. The streets were swarming with polo-shirted fathers unloading flat-screen TVs and Laura Ashley mothers hoisting Container Store boxes of folded clothes from mini-vans. My trash bags felt heavy. It seemed as if everyone else had been preparing for this very moment for their entire lives, whereas I hadn’t even bothered to print out the directions.
My uncle’s girlfriend asked me if I knew where to go. I didn’t. They tried to disguise their surprise. I tried not to blurt out that the reason I was going here and not somewhere else was that I had spent the other $60 application fee on shoes.
I got in line to pick-up my key. A yellow shirted move-in assistant eyed my trash bags. “The dumpsters are that way,” he informed me.
I tried to smile.
My roommate later admitted she was afraid of me because I didn’t have a blanket for two weeks. It was almost a month before I found out about that foam stuff people put on their mattresses to disguise the rubber-feel.
Eventually though, I got the hang of things but even after three years my dad is still waiting for that letter.
