On Pleasing

She was a New York City girl. She was Irish and Puerto Rican and Greek--some kind of combination like that. She had coarse brown hair she parted to one side. She had big dark eyes and a buxom nondescript build and wore glasses with old-lady frames. She dressed indifferently in a t-shirt, shorts, and flip-flops. Sometimes she wore jeans and cheap tennis shoes. I'll call her Annie. My clothes were not a lot nicer than hers, unfortunately--and I thought a lot about clothes then.

It was the summer of 1982. I was 16, and enrolled in a five-week summer program for high school students at Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism. I lived in California. I'd thought the program, in Evanston, Illinois, would be an adventure and my parents agreed it sounded like a good idea. It was my first time ever away from home alone. I did not relax the whole five weeks.

I found living in a dorm with a roommate weird, and I found the pace of the program alienating. I was terribly distracted by social matters. My tomboy roommate hated my guts; I worried that I "wasn't making friends."

The summer staff at Medill were working journalists, all on the young side. They tried to create a life-like "newsroom" atmosphere for the budding teenaged reporters, which in those days meant we slaved over our assignments at jewel-toned IBM Selectrics. The staffers would burst into the room where we were working and give us "updates" about the "breaking news" we were supposed to be chronicling.

I hated typing and I could not abide the clamor. I was irritated by the staffers, who cooked up subjects for practice news stories with horrendously difficult personal names, so we reporters-in-training would have to listen carefully and get the spelling just right, honing our newsroom acumen. They were just doing their jobs, and I certainly don't hold it against them today.

My dumpy and childlike clothes were a source of mortification, if not agony, that summer. I remember one polyester-blend sleeveless blouse, packed because it was suitable for very warm weather. Its silly wide neckline ruff made me feel like a clown. Then there were the elastic sandals with the soft wedge soles, from some discount outlet. No matter how quietly I tried to walk, they made a resounding noise, between a ffftt and a thunk, with my every step. My tomboy roommate and her girlfriend, radiant with mutual adoration, smirked at each other as I passed by.

In hindsight, it may well be that my parents provided an inadequate allowance for my attire--not understanding such things. Or perhaps I would not have selected a wardrobe that pleased me any more if I'd had unlimited money, because my terminal lack of confidence was the real issue.

The year 1982 marked the height of "preppy look." Reagan was in office. The culture was pulling hard away from an ideal of self-expression, toward one of conformity. Perhaps, a decade earlier, in that setting, clothes would not have mattered to a typical girl quite as they mattered to me.

How I envied those girls from Manhattan and Connecticut, who looked so stunning in their lustrous gold earrings and their ironed designer jeans, or their impeccable silken blouses and their sandals of buttery leather. How I soaked up their broad gestures and their resonant voices of entitlement, when they spoke up in the seminars, asking questions and raising issues.

Those comely girls worked like fiends. I remember the creases between their eyebrows and they way their lips whitened as they drummed their Selectrics. I remember how the instructors read their pieces aloud in the group, as "fine examples."

I'd peer into the the dorm lounge in the evenings, where the Manhattan girls lolled in unselfconscious beauty, like Degas' dancers. They talked on the pay phone, or chatted with each other, or with boys, or they massaged each others' backs.

Many of those sophisticated girls led double lives, their teenaged forays into realms of sex and drugs invisible to their doting parents. They maintained the respect and loyalty of peers in all their doings--all the more so if they honed that touch of flippance, and deployed it well, when speaking of mom, or dad, or the American History teacher with the sad longing in his voice.

One evening I was struggling with an assignment which I realized I might not be able to finish in time because I was still missing quotations from crucial sources. I walked dejectedly into the dorm lounge and there sat Annie, watching television.

"Did you finish the big project for tomorrow?" I asked.

Annie turned down the volume.

"Huh? Oh, no. I'm not gonna turn mine in till later in the week."

"But they said the deadline was tomorrow morning," I said.

Annie looked at me, and asked, "What are they gonna do if you don't finish it tomorrow, string ya' up?"

"They give you some kind of evaluation at the end of this program," I said, "Some kind of grade."

"Yeah, well, fortunately I'm here for my own benefit, not theirs."

It's important that I not give the impression Annie was the resentful type. As far as I knew, she had not been marched off to the Northwestern program by overly ambitious parents, but had chosen to be there. She was low-key and earthy and gentle. She was somewhat of a loner, like me. And she was ruthlessly matter-of-fact about whose terms she did anything on.

What else I knew about Annie is that her father back in New York City was a junior-high-school mathematics teacher and her mother was a cop. Or was it the other way around? She had younger brothers, I think. She was the kind of girl who wrote to her parents when she was away from home, and when she spoke to her mother and father, they put her brothers on the line.

The lounge was empty that evening except for Annie and me. The room seemed creepy to me, dimly lit, with battered old couches, a hideous vinyl-tiled floor, and a vending machine. The surroundings had the air of an underworld, some seedy crash-pad for losers who could not dress and who failed at deadlines. I shivered. My knees buckled slightly; I checked the urge to bolt.

Annie's insouciance about the assignment touched a deep ambivalence in me, a forgotten-but-raw nerve. Her example illuminated possibilities I was both scared of, and thrilled by.

I, unlike Annie, typically jumped when directives were given--even when they were implied. My "jumps" missed as often as they hit: I frequently did not live up to others' or my own expectations. I failed algebra a couple of years running, and driver education; I got ignored at prom-time--but, mind you, I did try. In my muddled way, I was concerned with outcomes. Part of me really wanted to please, really cared what elders thought, and peers. I often despaired, finding the admiration of either class of people a scarce commodity.

After he determined that I'd gaffed socially, one twit of a college boyfriend would look twitchy and indignant. At the earliest opportunity, he would hiss in my ear, "You are your own worst enemy! I swear, there is part of you that keeps tripping you up all the time!"

Regarding my desire and ability to please, he had it so pitifully wrong.

I suspected as early as my late teens that the self "that kept tripping me up all the time," when it came to earning strokes of praise, was the self that refused our culture's hypocritical gambit, that did not confuse others' approval with basic human worth. In fact, this "saboteur" was the part of my being I badly needed to heed and develop: the one that did not mistake "towing the line" for acquiring self-discipline and living a good life.

Years after I was grown, in my twenties, I hit a low point, after I was fired from some job or other. For weeks, it was difficult to walk with my head held up, to look people in the eye.

Oh, it was only too clear I'd failed. What was more, I was failing at life. I obsessed over a mental image of a great heavenly score card, with my "successes" and "failures," each assigned a value, all tallied into a sum, and rounded neatly to the tenths place--sort of like a cosmic grade-point average.

Just who kept this score, and what the alleged, cosmic consequences of "succeeding" and "failing" were, I did not address in that miserable fantasy. If it was determined at some finite point that I had "succeeded" at life, according to my overall score, maybe I was going to get presents in my stocking at Christmas, and if I "failed," I suppose I'd get coal and a switch.

I bring up the story because it shows just how blinded I was, even into adult life--how late I still believed in Santa Claus.

They ran us kids hard that summer in Evanston. That program was certainly one of the more demanding of its kind, probably still is. That's good. Some of us discover our vocations early, and the program affords such directed youngsters the opportunity to reach for their goals.

I did not think about Northwestern, or Annie, for years. But that ambivalence about pleasing has been surfacing more plainly for me, and with it, the memory of her unlikely example. It was the evening in the lounge, which has turned out to be the most lasting gift of the Northwestern experience for me. The memory of Annie's example, again and again, torpedoes any tendency of mine to try to master the limbo-dance through bars held by others, as a condition for my own self-respect.

Annie identified a space in my mind, away from others' expectations. It's a stillness, a bedrock self-trust, in which passion can arise, in an entirely personal direction, and at one's own pace. It's the freedom to do what's important, without worrying so much about what matters less--even if it's expected.