I attended school from kindergarten straight through until I got my bachelor's degree. Every fall was a new start, with new teachers and classes. Every spring was a completion, as each school year drew to a close. There were report cards and special projects and holiday breaks and summer vacations. Constant forward momentum.
But out in the real world, with Yale in my rear-view mirror, my life seemed to come to a dead halt.
I moved in with my mom in Summerville, S.C., a suburb of Charleston. She lived with her husband of nearly 15 years, an 80-something semi-invalid who had more heart attacks, strokes, bouts of gout and other ailments than I could keep track of. He ran her ragged as she waited on him hand and foot, calling her name at least a thousand times a day while she screamed at him to stop screaming for her.
My older sister had also recently moved in. She was 25, unmarried, completely miserable and the new mother of a beautiful baby girl.
My mom and stepfather were in one bedroom, my sister and niece were in another, and I was in the third, surrounded by moving boxes that I never unpacked. Not to mention thousands of roaches, both of the exceedingly large, flying, outdoor variety and the small, scurrying, indoor variety.
It was supposed to be temporary. I would live there while I saved money to go someplace else and be an actress. One of my Yale friends had moved to Chicago to hit the theater scene, so I made Chicago my goal, too. And I started hitting the pavement in Charleston, immediately being cast in various community theater productions (as a slave and later as a mammy and later as a middle-aged black mama, despite being reasonably attractive and under 25).
Buoyed by collection calls from my unpaid creditors and a desperate need for a car, I also got a job.
I took a $16,000-per-year secretarial job at a three-person software company. I had a love/hate relationship with the CEO, a rich Indian from Bombay (as Mumbai was still called). He taught me a lot, and he criticized me a lot, and he got more than his money's worth. I wasn't just his secretary. I was also his marketing department, writing his proposals, jazzing up his sales letters, creating an animated demo for his software product.
The months dragged by, without a report card, a reprieve or a vacation in sight.
If real life was living with my mom in a slow Southern town, having no friends and no boyfriends, working a low-paying job in a dingy office park and playing bit parts in community theater, real life was the death of all my dreams.
I was extremely depressed.
My mom, who has bipolar disorder, ordered me to get psychiatric help. I sullenly shuffled off to an inpatient clinic for an intake assessment and reported back that I didn't have psychiatric issues that required hospitalization. My mom's response was, "If nothing's wrong with you, then get your own apartment."
So I did.
Eight months after moving in with her, I moved out. To a slightly more upscale dinky small town and into my my own place. My mom helped me find, clean up and reupholster a second-hand pullout couch that initially smelled of cat pee. The newly improved version served as my only bed.
It was my first apartment without a roommate or an oppressive boyfriend.
I took a lover 10 days after moving in.
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