Today I fired the dragon lady who has run my department of Woulda Coulda Shoulda since the day I dropped out of college in 1970. It was just before the holidays when I decided, based on a full six weeks at Southern Connecticut State College, that college was stupid. The professors were stupid. The students were boring.
I was sitting in a large lecture hall taking math for non-math people. It was dark. I was hungry. It wasn’t life as I imagined it after high school.
So I drove back home from New Haven to Weston and told my Dad I thought I could learn more sitting around at home listening to his friends talking than in school.
He said fine and made me go to typing school even after I explained that my life plan was to intensify my poetry writing and become a famous author.
The whole reason I was at that college to begin with was that I didn’t want to go to Syracuse or Ithaca which would have required moving away from my boyfriend who ended up going to Canada to avoid the draft anyway. Plus, I was too chicken to live away from home, and the idea of being in a dorm was so nauseating I couldn’t even imagine it.
When I screwed up my junior year of high school so badly I was sent away to Canadian boarding school, I lived in a dorm and spent most of the time huddled under the eaves or shut up in a stall in the bathroom– it was that much fun.
I don’t know why I thought I needed someone to tell me repeatedly that I was an jack ass for dropping out of college, which was one thing, but then she expanded her job description.
As the next forty odd years went by, this disembodied voice took it upon her self to point out one mis-step after another, almost like a live game commentator. “Oh, you shouldn’t have gone that blonde,” or “You are such a moron for bringing a cheese plate to a vegan dinner party,” or “Why did you waste three years dating that idiot?”
And all that time, I’d never caught the woman in the act. She disappeared every time I rose up to defend my choices. Not any more. I caught her the other day going on and on and on about how I shouldn’t have bought my stupid Benz because it’s too expensive and it’s out of warranty and who the hell did I think I was anyway?
So I took her by her scrawny neck like she was a branch in the forest and I was a German Shepard looking for something to kill, and I shook her until the bitch died. Then I kicked her in the head with the toe of my pointy, high-heeled shoe for good measure and left her on a carpet of dead leaves. After that, I went back to my house to eat some ice cream knowing I could do so in peace and quiet, finally.
Then, later, when I was kicking my shoes off my aching dogs, the pointy-toed ones I had kicked her with, I thought I heard her miserable voice reaching out from the forest to tell me I was too old to wear shoes like that. But then I realized it was only me talking trash to myself, and I told myself to shut the hell up.
