Extraordinary, Ordinary People: A Memoir of Family

chapter twenty-five

Throughout the summer of 1974, my parents and I were consumed with preparations for my impending move to South Bend. As part of that, I went back to skating and ballet to lose the thirty pounds that I’d put on during my senior year. My mother helped by cooking only healthy foods, leading my father to complain that he didn’t really like dinners where “green things were the centerpiece of the meal.”

I could tell, though, that the prospect of my really leaving home for the first time, perhaps never to return, was starting to trouble my mother. Tensions would rise between us over the smallest things. One such incident still bothers me to this day. I’d gone to a sorority sister’s wedding on Father’s Day of that year. My parents and I had planned to have dinner together to celebrate the holiday, but the wedding reception ran very long and it was far away in the outskirts of Denver. When I finally returned home, well after dinnertime, my mother was furious, declaring that I was showing a lack of respect for their feelings. I countered that I’d called to say that I would be late and couldn’t do anything about my sisters—and hence my ride—wanting to stay until the bridal bouquet was thrown.

My father called me into my bedroom and said that he fully understood what had happened but that this was a new phase for the whole family and asked if I could be “a little more sensitive” to my mother’s feelings. It occurred to me that my mother and father had grown up very differently in this regard. My father had left home at eighteen, never to return. My mother, on the other hand, had lived at home until she married at twenty-nine. She didn’t know what it was like to go off to college, and she was having a difficult time watching her daughter break up the family group—even if it was a perfectly natural thing to do.

The day of my departure for Notre Dame finally came. My parents took me to the airport and waved goodbye at the gate. Mother was, as expected, very emotional. Daddy was mostly worried about whether I would be able to navigate the change of planes in Chicago—not a crazy concern given the complications of O’Hare even in that day. He was reassured when I told him that I was planning to meet my college roommates’ families during the layover.

When I called the next day I told my parents that all had gone well. In fact, it hadn’t, and I got off to a rocky start. I arrived at the tiny South Bend airport after it had closed down for the night. The plane from Chicago had been late and South Bend wasn’t, in those days, a hub of activity in any case. There was no one at the desk and no apparent means of transportation to the university. I was a little panicked, but then I saw another young woman who looked lost too and asked if she might by any chance be trying to get to Notre Dame. “Yes,” she said, obviously relieved to have found a companion. We tracked down the only cab driver still at the airport. He took pity on us, despite the fact that he was preparing to go home for the night, and drove us to Notre Dame.

The next day I went out to find a few things to furnish my room. My parents had given me a new car for graduation, an Oldsmobile Omega, which I’d named Boris, after my favorite Russian opera, Boris Godunov. Boris had a tendency to overheat and did so that day in the August heat and humidity of South Bend. I pulled to the side and walked across the street to the service station. The attendant said sharply, “You’ll have to bring it over here.” I took offense. When I asked even more pointedly why he couldn’t go across the street and fix it, he said very meekly, “I thought it might cool off quicker in the shade over here.”

I’d reacted in this way because South Bend in particular, but also Indiana, had a reputation for racism. My father had reminded me that the emergence of the modern-day Ku Klux Klan had occurred in Indiana, not Dixie. To avoid problems, a fellow student at Notre Dame had told me to find the biggest Fighting Irish sticker I could and put it on the rear window of my car. “They leave Notre Dame students alone,” he said. I was conditioned to expect trouble and viewed the gas station attendant’s response through that prism. After that incident, however, I decided that I was going to give people in South Bend the benefit of the doubt. And thankfully, I never had another problem with anyone. To this day, I think back on that rush to judgment whenever I am tempted to see racism in a rebuff.

Later that day as I was moving boxes into my room, a nice young man asked if I needed help. I was immediately attracted to Wayne Bullock, the Notre Dame fullback. When I asked what I could do for him, he said he wanted chocolate chip cookies. Soon I was standing in the kitchen of Lewis Hall, the convent that doubled as the graduate women’s dormitory on campus, trying to make sense of a Toll House cookie recipe, when I encountered another PhD student named Jane Robinett who seemed to know what to do. Jane became my big sister and my best friend at Notre Dame, and we have remained close ever since.

Wayne and I began to see each other, though I knew that he had a “hometown honey.” He was a bruising fullback with a heart of gold whose greatest desire was to play pro football and start a family so that he could have lots of kids. When my parents came to visit South Bend that fall, my father fell in love with Wayne. He was my dad’s kind of running back, tough and relentless. And he was my dad’s kind of guy, sweet and solid. It seemed that every time I called home, Daddy asked about Wayne and was sorely disappointed to learn that the relationship wasn’t progressing. When my parents came back in the spring, Daddy was disturbed to find that Wayne was no longer on the scene. I’d dated Randy Payne, another nice guy, for a while, but my new love was a six-foot-five middle linebacker who wore a bandana around his head and an earring in his ear. “He looks like a thug,” Daddy said.

Not surprisingly, I took offense, reminding my father that he shouldn’t judge people by how they looked. After all, I was experimenting with bell-bottoms and platform shoes. Daddy didn’t say much after that, but he clearly hoped that I’d find “a nice boy.” It was obvious by then that we didn’t share the same criteria for a mate. My mother gently reminded Daddy that the young John Wesley Rice Jr. had been a bit of a rogue too—dancing and playing cards, smoking cigarettes and drinking whiskey. “And you were a preacher,” she added.

Graduate school was challenging enough but not really difficult. The work in the government department confirmed my interest in Soviet studies, but I found the classes in economics more exciting. Many years later I’d take up the study of military affairs because it was more concrete. Militaries have weapons that you can see, budgets that you can quantify, and doctrine that you can read. Studying the politics of the Soviet Union meant trying to divine what Leonid Brezhnev might have said to Alexei Kosygin from little clues in Russian newspapers. It was not for me. Fortunately, one of the professors in the economics department took me under his wing and helped me understand how to use quantitative methods in the study of political and economic phenomena. I was pretty good at math and found econometrics and statistics useful. It was akin to doing the complicated theory problems that I’d encountered in music. I received all As at Notre Dame, but despite the faculty’s encouragement, I decided not to pursue a PhD in economics. I thoroughly enjoyed South Bend but decided that I would return to Denver. I thought that I should, for the first time in my life, get a job!