Magic Doors

The On Display collab topic for the month is "Gates and Doorways." The month of January is named for Janus, the Roman god of gates and doorways, who is commonly depicted with two faces, one looking in each direction.

When I was growing up, my favorite books were the ones in which children opened a gate in a wall and found a secret garden or walked into a wardrobe and out into a magical country or stepped through a mysterious door into the past. I loved these kinds of stories for the promise that the simple act of stepping through a portal could be a transformative experience.

I've been looking for those doors all my life.

The closest I've ever come to a magic doorway were the ivy covered arches of Wellesley. Just getting there at all was a feat in itself. My family had little money and the annual tuition plus room and board at that time was nearly $10,000. It seems little enough now, in comparison to current college costs, but it might have been $100,000, so far out of reach was it for people like us.

What's more, I don't think my parents realized how desperately I wanted to go away to school. My mother had left college after a year and a half to marry my father. My father, though an intelligent, well-read man, had never gone beyond high school. But I remembered my uncles, who lived with us when I was young, going away to college and coming home on vacations somehow changed: older, worldlier, more confident. I wanted that experience for myself, and most of all, I wanted to go to Wellesley.

Part of my desire to escape to another state altogether was because of the unhealthy situation of my family at that time. We'd moved to Maine the summer before. I had to finish my last year of high school in a new school, five hundred miles away from my friends in New Jersey. By October of that year, my parents, my three sisters, and I were living in a tiny, two-bedroom mobile home on our 13-acre property. Dad was ostensibly remodeling an old school house on the property to become our family's home, but for several years my family was stuck in the trailer. My parents had the slightly larger bedroom in the back. My sister Lori and I slept in bunkbeds in the other bedroom. There was just a narrow space between the bunkbeds and the combination closet/bureau. The two youngest girls slept on a foldout couch in the living room.

I've heard of experiments that demonstrate that mice living in an overcrowded cage become edgy, sharp-tempered, and often murderous. Even the most functional family would have had trouble adjusting to life in that tiny mobile home, especially during the bitter cold and snow of a Maine winter. I've touched on this wretched experience in a previous entry, and I won't belabor it. Suffice it to say that the months between September 1978 to September 1979 constitute the worst year of my life.

Is it any wonder I wanted to escape through a magic door?

Yet for some time, I feared it was an unachievable dream. I can clearly remember my father telling me, "The Lord doesn't have grandchildren." My parents had been involved in a fundamentalist church, and Dad was saying that, because I didn't subscribe to the same beliefs, the money to send me to an expensive school might not be available.

As it turns out, God came through, even for a non-fundamentalist like me. I was accepted to Wellesley and I was offered enough financial aid to make my attendance possible. I can remember walking through a wooded area on campus from my dorm to my calculus class in the Science Center and just feeling so grateful to be there, to have escaped from the my hellish home life, to be on my own, finally.

It wasn't Narnia or a secret garden in Yorkshire, but it was my magic land, nonetheless. I had passed through the doorway and had at last begun a life separate and apart from my family.

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