Extraordinary, Ordinary People: A Memoir of Family

chapter twenty-one

Through the spring and summer of 1970 life was once again taken up with piano, skating, and school. My first major figure-skating competition, held that August, was relatively successful—I wound up finishing third. Many years later I teased my parents about having put me in the wrong sport—I was five foot seven with the long legs of someone who was five foot ten, and that was exactly the wrong body type to get any leverage for jumping. “I should have been a tennis player,” I told them. They reminded me that it was I who’d wanted to be a figure skater.

That summer competition was the only one in which I ever placed. I was simply not a very good skater. In any case, I loved the challenge, and the sport taught me discipline and perseverance. I have often said that skating taught me more about character than the piano did. It’s really difficult to work hard, fail at the moment of truth, and have to get up and work at it the next day. But that is precisely what skating taught me to do. It may be why my parents continued to pour money into my obviously limited potential on the ice and why my father got up every morning and took me to the rink before dawn.

I’d settled into a very nice life and didn’t think much of it when my parents said one day after school that they wanted to talk about college. I assumed they meant that it was time to think about applying to universities, since I was entering my senior year. But they had something else in mind.

We sat in the living room, my mother on the sofa, Daddy in the pink chair, and I on the piano bench. This put us in a semicircle so that our eyes met very directly. Daddy seemed quite hesitant. He started the conversation by noting that I had almost completed the requirements for graduation at St. Mary’s. This was true, but I was planning to take a set of Advanced Placement courses and work extra hard on my piano the next year. I had my eye on entering and finishing conservatory and then going to study in Europe.

Daddy said that he’d been talking to people at the university and that it might be possible for me to skip my senior year and begin my college curriculum there. This would allow me more time for piano as well. He knew that I wanted to apply to a music conservatory, perhaps Juilliard in New York or the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia. But, he said, this was risky, since once I was in a conservatory I wouldn’t be able to change my mind and major in something else. Moreover, I had a lot of interests, and Daddy and my mother thought that I would be unhappy in a conservatory.

I protested that I really wanted to be a musician and that they knew this. Was this just a way to keep me in Denver? This retort came out rather bluntly, but I’d long suspected that my parents did not want me to leave home. It was true that I was pretty young. But I believed that they just couldn’t imagine sending me off to college and breaking up our tight-knit threesome. For the first time in my life I felt that this was more about them than about me, and I resented it.

Mother said nothing when I leveled this charge. Daddy remained calm and explained that I could always transfer after one year at Denver if I really wanted to but that they felt strongly that I should forgo my senior year at St. Mary’s. I could go to Denver practically tuition free thanks to a deep discount for the children of faculty. I said I’d think about it, but I didn’t like the idea.

Several days later I came back with a counterproposal. This time they sat on the sofa and I stood the entire time. I told them that I’d thought about it and had come up with a good idea. Why not finish my senior year in high school and start my freshman year in college at the same time? I wanted to finish with my high school class but was attracted to getting a jump on college.

My parents explained that St. Mary’s cost a lot of money. I selfishly said that I knew that but wasn’t prepared to give up my senior year. I remember this as one of the most unpleasant conversations I ever had with my parents. They stood their ground and I stood mine. I know that I was angry, and I suspect that they were too.

The next day we talked again, and after some back-and-forth they agreed to my idea. We set about designing a hybrid path. Each day I would skate and go to DU until eleven o’clock. Then I’d head over to St. Mary’s, where I’d take only a couple of required courses and practice the piano. After that I’d go home to study, skate, and practice the piano some more before bedtime.

This worked for exactly one quarter. I’ve always needed more in my life than success at work, and I quickly found that I didn’t belong socially to either St. Mary’s or the university. The final year is supposed to be a bonding year for seniors, but I was rarely around for any of the activities and was largely excluded from various committees and class offices. Some of my teachers resented my attending the university, taking it as an affront to the quality of their teaching. When I proudly showed my first college English paper, for which I’d received an A, to a teacher at St. Mary’s, she grumpily dismissed it as not very good or worthy of an A in her Advanced Placement course. St. Mary’s made it quite clear that my college grades wouldn’t be counted toward my academic standing. There was no chance that I would be valedictorian.

I knew that something had to give, but I was bound and determined not to admit to my parents that they’d been right—especially given the high tuition they were paying. So I decided that I’d complete the hybrid year but that I was going to have to find footing in one world or the other. It would be easier to go forward than to go back, I reasoned. That meant really becoming a college student.

First I had to free up some time. I was tired of getting up every morning at four-thirty and never being able to go out with my new college friends for pizza or a burger. So I quit competitive skating that spring, continuing to skate but at a greatly reduced level. Second, I started spending what free time I had at the university, going to St. Mary’s only for my classes. Since I had turned sixteen and now could drive, traveling back and forth was much easier. My life began to revolve around the university and my new friends—many of them hockey players in whom I had more than a passing interest as potential boyfriends.

St. Mary’s receded more and more into the background. I’d been fifteen at the time of my junior prom and not yet dating, so my father had arranged for his secretary’s brother to take me to the dance. He was a nice young man, but I decided that night that I was never again going to a big dance with someone my father had chosen. When senior prom rolled around, I asked one of the hockey players. He went with me, but the poor guy—a college boy—was so uncomfortable at a high school prom that we left early.

The social strains of being so young and so advanced in school had finally caught up with me. I was now barely sixteen and a freshman in college. My parents were concerned too. They worried that I was suddenly hanging out with a crowd much older and far more mature than I was. Nineteen seventy-one was a time of sex, drugs, and rock and roll. When I announced that I wanted to move to campus for my sophomore year they came unglued. My father said that I’d never live in the dorms because he was a university administrator and “knew what went on in there.”

My mother added her two cents. “You are just too young to be hanging out with these people. What could they possibly want from you except to take advantage of you?”

I hit the roof. “This early college enrollment was your idea,” I said. “Now you’re going to have to live with the consequences and trust that I’m smarter than you think I am.”

This was the biggest fight my parents and I had ever had. Looking back on it, I see that they had set in motion events that challenged me to grow up very fast. I think they believed that I could advance in school and remain their little girl socially. But I was not one of those prodigies who had no social skills and no social life. I loved to have friends, and for better or worse, my friends were now college kids.

In response to my father’s retort about the dorms, I asked him what he thought of the sorority houses. I don’t think he saw what was coming and said that the Greek houses were a lot better. “Okay, then I’ll join a sorority,” I told them, and I did. I pledged Alpha Chi Omega. I loved the house and spent much of my free time there, learning to play bridge, planning social functions, and becoming a little sister of the fraternity Lambda Chi Alpha.

One of the truly anticlimactic days of my life was high school graduation. The school didn’t even spell my name correctly on my diploma. My mother, who sixteen years before had put so much work into creating that name, sent the diploma back so that “Condoleezza” would be spelled properly, with two zs. The diploma wasn’t returned until years later, when some members of the State Department press corps, having heard the story, petitioned St. Mary’s for a replacement as a departure gift when I stepped down as secretary of state in 2009.