Early in adolescence, as my younger sister and I began to develop distinct and disparate personalities, our mother chose our future universities. Katie, with twin interests in sunbathing and fashion, would attend the University of California at Santa Barbara, a party school on the beach. And I—writer of poetry and singer of show tunes, in thrift-store circle skirts and gold eye shadow—would head four hours north to the University of California at Santa Cruz, whose brochures depicted smiling students of various ethnicities.
“Their mascot’s the banana slug,” my mother told me.
My sister snorted. “That’s perfect for a weirdo like you.”
A weirdo in our high school, to be sure, but at Santa Cruz, I wasn’t exotic enough. Eight small colleges on the campus attracted different demographics of students. I’d hoped to attend Porter College, known for its focus on the arts. Instead, I found myself unloading my single futon and Maxfield Parrish posters outside Crown College, among a horde of economics and business majors.
“Porter was overrun with applications,” my admissions counselor told me. “Crown seemed like a good fit for you.”
Why? I wondered as I sat in the student lounge that first night. Because I’m white?
In a dormitory packed with several dozen kids, I found myself sharing sugar cookies and punch with a room full of Anglos, plus two African-American students and a boy from the Philippines. Most shared stories of bland, happy families and the desire to obtain a lucrative desk job.
If anyone had aspirations of novel writing or performing on Broadway, they weren’t telling. And when the resident assistant turned to me and said, “What’s your story, Melissa?” I clammed up as well. My vaudevillian great-grandparents, my lesbian mother, my brother with Down syndrome—they all seemed suddenly irrelevant in this room of future suits.
“I’m a literature major,” I mumbled. “That’s all.”
Porter College housed my lit courses. I walked across campus under towering redwoods, past groups of chummy Latino, Asian, and African-American students. I’d grown up in multicultural Los Angeles with friends from many parts of the world. These were the kind of people with whom I’d hoped to fraternize in college. But how could I gain entrance into their lives?
I searched for groups outside of Crown. As a heterosexual, I felt like an intruder in the LGBT club, and I found no outlets for students with disabled siblings. If I’d had more gumption, I would’ve joined intramural sports or the student newspaper. Instead—naïve and lacking confidence—I spent my freshman and sophomore years wandering aimlessly.
In my creative-writing class, I befriended a dreadlocked freshman from Porter. Jason captivated our attention with his narratives about growing up black in San Francisco in the 1970s. I saw that the Vietnamese students’ stories of emigrating to the United States, and the African students’ tales of colorful culture back home, caused our professor to sit up straight and stroke his goatee with pleasure, while my own stories of innocent girls enlightened by wise transients on the Mallin downtown Santa Cruz caused him to invoke lethal adjectives such as “sentimental” and “pathetic.” Being white and straight, I felt doubly cursed with a dearth of fascinating material. What story could I tell to prove my worth?
Had I been housed at Merrill College, with its focus on social consciousness, I might have found the faculty support to disclose how my mother lost custody of my siblings and me after she came out of the closet. As it was, I stopped writing.
I attended Peruvian concerts and falafel nights on the campus, and switched my major to music. With my roommate, Anna—a theater major with dusky skin and a dark mane of hair gifted by her Portuguese mother—I auditioned for a musical-performance class taught by Tom Lehrer, the singer-songwriter.
Anna sang a comic piece from Fiddler on the Roof, while I performed a thin rendition of Fantine’s “I Dreamed a Dream” from Les Misérables. Three other girls that evening auditioned with the same song; I felt dismayed but not surprised the next day when Professor Lehrer posted the class list with Anna’s name at the top and mine altogether absent.
“Maybe you should’ve sung something a little less …" My roommate’s voice trailed off.
“White,” I said.
After a semester of intense training at UCSC’s music school, I continued to lose parts to students with just a little more talent and, frequently, a little more pigmentation in their skin. Desperate for a major to call home, I switched once more, to psychology. There I met Elliot Aronson, a professor of social psychology whose research involved the study of group dynamics. I rejoiced to find myself one of a handful of students selected the following semester for his seminar, “The Life Cycle: Psychology and Philosophy of Meaning.”
We met in a cozy lounge the first night. My classmates’ faces glowed golden in the firelight. All but one student were Anglo. I wondered how, on a campus committed to cultural diversity, Professor Aronson’s self-described random selection had generated such a group. Were we part of a social-psychology experiment studying the invisibility of run-of-the-mill white students on campus?
The one African-American student in the class, Laura, captured my interest. She was a tall, muscled goddess who biked all over campus in flowing skirts and Birkenstocks, hair in braids and tawny silk spilling from her armpits. We became friends of sorts—cycled back to our respective colleges (she at Porter, me at Crown) together and attended a lecture given by Coretta Scott King, followed by a performance of the university’s gospel choir.
Inspired by King and the music, I closed my eyes and sang along with “Amazing Grace,” swaying like the singers on stage. When the song ended, I opened my eyes to find Laura staring at me. “You sing like a black woman,” she said. “I love your gold eye shadow.”
The next night, Professor Aronson led us in a guided meditation. We stretched out on the carpet beside the fire, and he asked us to visualize ourselves stranded in some perilous situation. “Picture someone in the class rescuing you,” he said. “Someone you trust. Someone you’d like to emulate.”
I pictured Laura, of course, with her empowered biceps and her hippie couture. After the meditation, Professor Aronson asked us to disclose whom we’d chosen. I flushed red as I murmured Laura’s name. I blushed even deeper when her husky alto voice rang out in the room, and several of our male classmates did a disappointed double-take. “I saw Melissa,” she said.
After the class ended, we drifted apart. Then came the Loma Prieta earthquake, which knocked my rental house off its foundation and sent me scurrying south to live closer to my mother. I transferred to the College of Creative Studies at UC-Santa Barbara. Fifteen eccentric, mostly Anglo students sat in literature and writing seminars, studying fiction writing and poetry. In our tiny lounge, my classmates and I read Milton aloud and sang arias from Dido and Aeneas. Informed by my brief stint at UC-Santa Cruz, I signed up for a course on Gertrude Stein and proudly outed my mother in class. Where once I had disappeared into diversity, now the lack of it helped me find my voice.