Lissie looked at the phone.
“She hung up,” she said.
“Boy,” Jenny said.
“She actually hung up,” Lissie said, still amazed, and put the receiver back on the hook.
“I think you were absolutely right,” Jenny said. “She was being unreasonable.”
“I’ll talk to Dad tomorrow,” Lissie said, nodding.
“You think he’ll let you?”
“Oh, sure,” Lissie said.
On Saturday morning, she called home at seven-thirty, while Connie was eating breakfast and Jamie was still in bed. He padded to the phone, listened to his daughter’s plea, and said he would discuss it with her mother. She called again on Sunday night at eight, and he told her they were still discussing it, even though Connie had already given an emphatic “No!” On Monday morning, again at seven-thirty, Lissie called and began crying on the phone, saying she was never allowed to do anything all the other girls were allowed to do, and how could they be so mean, all she was asking for was the use of a car that was anyhow insured, and didn’t he care about the fact that this was her vacation and that she might like to spend it doing something she wanted to do for a change, especially after having been cooped up at Henderson for the past month because of a dumb episode she hadn’t even been a part of? And what about all the money he’d spent on ski lessons and liftline tickets when she was just a kid, didn’t he want to see something beneficial come of all that?
He told her again he would discuss it with her mother, but there was no discussing it further with Connie. Connie left for work in high dudgeon, telling him if she heard one more word about that fucking station wagon and Lissie’s trip to Aspen, she would herself take the car and disappear from the face of the earth. Ten minutes later, he called Lissie back and told her she could neither borrow her mother’s car nor go to Colorado in anybody else’s car.
When she began to plead again, he hung up.
3
As far as Lissie was concerned, her father’s refusal to come to her rescue was an act of rank betrayal. She had always been able to depend on him in her frequent arguments with her mother, but this time he had failed her, and she felt it necessary to let her disappointment and her displeasure be known.
Throughout the entire length of her school vacation, she moved listlessly about the house or sulked silently in her room. She refused to accompany her parents to the opening of 1776 on the ground that the title had been stolen from Lafayette High School’s literary-art magazine, for which Scarlett Kreuger was art editor, an accusation patently ridiculous, but one Lissie stubbornly maintained. She refused to go with them to a “First Day of Spring” party at the Lipscombes, even though the invitation had clearly stated “Bring along the kids,” on the ground that the first day of spring was Friday, March 21, and not Saturday, March 22, and she didn’t like to celebrate an occasion after the opportunity had passed. She expressed neither joy nor interest in the daffodils and crocuses tentatively blooming on the riverbank behind the house, refused to attend church with her parents on Palm Sunday, and generally behaved like a prisoner in her own home. In the privacy of their bedroom, Connie expressed to Jamie the wish that their daughter would hurry the hell back to school.
The situation was exacerbated in the week before Easter when Lissie received letters from both Vassar and Wellesley, her first and second choice colleges. She had been rejected by both. She blamed this, in ascending order, on Miss Eloise Larkin, head of the phys ed department, coach of the soccer team, and the tight-assed lady who’d blown the whistle after Ulla’s little pot party; and Jonathan Holtzer, headmaster of Henderson State Penitentiary, who had written the letter announcing Lissie’s Intermediate Discipline, a carbon of which had undoubtedly found its way into the school files and subsequently into the Admissions offices of both Vassar and Wellesley. There was no other explanation. Her grades were good, she had done well on her S. A.T.s, her personal interviews had gone smoothly, she had in fact been virtually certain of admission to both schools.
On Good Friday, Rusty Klein called to say she’d been accepted by Bennington, her first choice college. In that same day’s mail, Lissie got letters from both Radcliffe and Sarah Lawrence, her third and fourth choice schools, each of them rejecting her. She had been positive of Sarah Lawrence as a safety school, but Holtzer’s damn letter had done her in there as well. She had applied to only four colleges. She would be graduating in June. She was all dressed up for a party — with no place to go. When her vacation ended on Easter Sunday, she insisted on taking the train back to school, refusing even to allow her parents to drive her to the Stamford station, preferring instead to take a taxi. In her room that night, she commiserated with Jenny — who had been turned down by her three first choice colleges and was still awaiting word from her safety school — and together that night they strolled the campus and smoked some very good stuff Jenny had bought from a boy in New York.
It was not until close to the end of May that Lissie found a college. She had fired off a dozen hasty applications to schools all up and down the Eastern Seaboard, had visited eight of them for personal interviews, and had finally been accepted by three: Boston University, Simmons, and Brenner. She rejected B.U. because it was too big, Simmons because it was too small, and finally settled for Brenner, which was also in Boston — where there were more kids between the ages of eighteen and twenty-two than any place else in the nation.
At graduation that year, she sat listening to Jonathan Holtzer’s uninspired speech about the challenges awaiting the youth of America, cursed him silently for the scurrilous action that had caused her to be rejected by the only schools she really wanted to go to, and vowed never to forgive him. She had, by then, forgiven her father for his dastardly behavior — he was, after all, her father — but she couldn’t shake the persistent feeling that if only he’d acted... well... just differently, things might have worked out better for her.
In her mind, the whole damn fiasco was inextricably linked, an opera in five acts: if Miss Larkin hadn’t walked in on a party where Lissie hadn’t even been smoking, if Horseface Holtzer hadn’t taken such a hard-line stand, if her father had more strenuously argued on her behalf and gotten Holtzer to revoke the Intermediate Discipline and then expunge that damning letter from the record, and, finally, if he’d allowed her to go to Colorado like the mature and responsible young lady she was, why then Vassar would have accepted her for registration in the fall, and she’d be going to Poughkeepsie instead of to Brenner, which she supposed was okay but only because it was in Boston.
She wasn’t quite able to explain to herself how the Colorado trip had anything at all to do with the inexorable chain of events that had led to her sitting here in the sun, somewhat disconsolate and totally unexcited in cap and gown, “on the brink of life’s great adventure,” as Holtzer was now putting it, bound for a school that truly didn’t interest her. But the Colorado trip was somehow a part of it, the culminating example of her father’s inability to come to her defense when his strength was most needed.
“It is,” Holtzer said, “perhaps the greatest adventure you will ever undertake. I wish you godspeed and fare thee well, I wish you a safe voyage over life’s perilous waters, and a snug harbor on the opposite shore. To this graduating class of June, 1969, I extend my heartiest congratulations, my sincere good wishes, and my hopes for a bountiful future.”