Christmas Presents and Past. Janice Kay Johnson
and his mother exchanged news, phoning each other the minute a letter arrived. Dinah was now calling his mother by her first name, Barbara, instead of Mrs. O’Keefe.
With support waning for the war, Will wrote, he and the other recent draftees believed they might never end up abroad at all.
The 3rd Marine Division was sent home at the end of November, and the 3rd Brigade 82nd Airborne just a few weeks ago. Why would they withdraw experienced troops and then send a bunch of us who have to be taught how to tell the barrel of a rifle from the butt?
Dinah wanted to believe he was right, but she read in the paper about how the government was spying on everybody who participated in any kind of antiwar protest, and that didn’t seem to her the action of an administration committed to ending the war and healing the country. And even though troop levels were declining, CBS News reported there were still 475,200 U.S. military personnel left in Vietnam at the end of 1969. With one-year enlistments, hundreds of thousands of those must need replacements, and the draft had been held for a reason.
She didn’t say that aloud to his mother, though, or in her letters to Will. As it turned out, she didn’t need to. A hastily scribbled note arrived, telling her his battalion was shipping out.
Dinah kept writing almost every day. She was afraid that her day-to-day news must seem pedestrian to him, but Will assured her that wasn’t true. So she hid her worries and continued to write about classes, local gossip and her own struggle with her parents over her future.
We settled on a compromise, she wrote, pausing with her pen above the paper as she remembered the last in a long line of scenes. Beside her burned a tall, twisted candle, the first she’d lit to measure the months until Will would be home, filling her room with a sweet, fruity fragrance that reminded her of Grape Nehi.
The latest scene had taken place over the dinner table. It seemed as if half the time Dinah and her mother ended up silently scraping most of the food into the garbage. Nobody had much appetite when they were fighting. If she and her father weren’t clashing, then Stephen and he were. They fought over Stephen’s hair, his grades, his friends, his music. Dinah, at least, was still torn between the desire to please her parents and her outrage at the world her generation would inherit. Her brother was far more outspoken and unapologetic about his rebellion.
But Stephen hadn’t been home for dinner tonight. Lucky her, she had her father’s full attention. Face apoplectic, he’d slammed his fist onto the table, making dishes rattle. “You’re going to college and that’s final!”
Dinah’s heart was pounding so hard she could hardly breathe, but she kept looking at him with outward calm and said, “What if I don’t?”
Her mother hastily interceded. “Dinah, you have your whole lifetime ahead of you! We simply want to make sure you have the grounding you need to succeed. You’re too good a student to quit now….”
“If you don’t go, you’ve had the last penny of support from us,” her father roared.
“Are you going to tell me what I have to major in, too?” she yelled back. “What if I go for Women’s Studies?”
“You know that’s not…” her mother started to say.
He bellowed some more. Dinah jumped up and fled to her room, so upset she was ready to throw some clothes in a bag and take off. Susan’s and Christina’s parents were too conventional to let her stay with them, but she bet Monique’s mom wouldn’t care if she moved in until graduation. She could get a part-time job to supplement her summer’s earnings and help buy groceries.
She’d actually started grabbing clothes from a drawer when there was a soft knock on her door.
“Who is it?”
“May I come in?” her mother asked.
After a moment she sank down onto the bed, hugging an armful of shirts to her chest. “It’s your house.”
Opening the door, her mother said mildly, “I’ve always respected your right to privacy.”
Tears prickled in Dinah’s eyes. “I know you have.”
“May I sit down?”
She nodded.
They sat side by side for a long moment.
“Honey, I know you’re sure cooking is what you want to do with your life. Your dad…well, he just doesn’t see it as a profession. He thinks short-order cook.”
She rolled her eyes. “If he’d just educate himself…”
“Let me say my piece. You’re seventeen…. Yes, almost eighteen.” She waited while Dinah started to protest what she knew was coming—you’re too young to make smart decisions for yourself, blah, blah, blah— then subsided. Mom started just as she’d anticipated. “We all think we know what’s best when we’re your age, but most of us find out somewhere along the way that we were wrong.”
There was something just a little sad in her mother’s voice that made Dinah ask tentatively, “Did you?”
“If you mean, do I wish I hadn’t married your father, no.” She laughed a little. “Despite his occasional bullheadedness. But I hate my job, and I hate knowing I could do better than the men I work for. So yes. I was sure at eighteen that all I wanted to do was get married and have a family. Now I wish I’d gotten an education first. I wish I’d majored in business. I’m thinking about starting to take some classes.”
“Really?” Dinah asked in surprise. She was ashamed to realize that her mother’s grumbles about her job had just been background noise to her. She hadn’t really listened. “That’s great!” she said. “Is Daddy okay with it?”
“He’s the one who’s been encouraging me. It’s taken me a few years to see he’s right.”
Dinah blinked. “Daddy?” Her father was willing to surrender some of his creature comforts, maybe even some income if Mom cut back to part-time, so that she could find more personal satisfaction in what she did?
Seeing how stunned Dinah looked, her mother shook her head. “You don’t listen to him any more than he does to you. You’re both bullheaded.” She hesitated. “Whether you’re willing to see it or not, the truth is, he wants what’s best for you. He’s just convinced he knows better than you what that is.”
Dinah grimaced. “I noticed.”
“You and Will both talk as if college is like being on a chain gang. Everybody I know who went thinks those four years were the best years of their lives.”
“But I don’t want to be a teacher, or…or…”
“Most of what you learn in college isn’t vocational. Would it be so awful to develop analytical skills, or become a better writer? Maybe more informed about world events?”
“I’ve been in school for thirteen years.”
“College isn’t like high school. And there’s no reason, even if you go to a state school, you couldn’t live in the dorm. You’d be independent, without actually having to pay the bills or cook and clean.”
She’d thought her parents would expect her to commute to classes to save money. That it would be another four years just like high school.
Still…it would be four more years.
She said slowly, “What if we made a deal? What if I agree to go to college for two years, and then if I’m still sure I want to go to culinary school instead, you and Daddy would let me do that?”
There was a moment of silence.
Excited by her idea, she continued, “I’d be twenty then, not eighteen. You’d been married a whole year by the time you were twenty. So Daddy couldn’t argue that I wasn’t ready to decide what I wanted to do with my life.”
“No, he couldn’t, could he?”