Her: A Memoir by Christa Parravani Page B

the arts and tried their best to foster the feeling that anything was possible. It didn’t matter to them that we’d grown up in a single-parent home without enough money to buy books. It was clear we both loved reading. It had been that way since we lived in North Carolina and Mom made sure we went to the bookmobile every week. The bookmobile was Camp Lejeune’s traveling library, a cross between an ice cream truck, an RV, and an armored vehicle, full of musty books with dog-eared pages. It came to Tarawa Terrace, our neighborhood on the base, once a week, curbside at 3 p.m. on the dot. Like everything marine, it was never late or absent. Books were not to be overdue, or a demerit for the marine, our stepfather, would be issued. But we read promptly out of love as much as out of fear. Cara and I raced to finish, so we could discuss our discoveries before having to slide the book into the abyss of the return bin, which was located directly beside the van’s fuel door.
    Cara wrote as avidly as she read. She won a state-sponsored contest in second grade with a short story about a girl who abandons her family to move into a hot air balloon. The girl floats above her small town for weeks and subsists on a stolen picnic basket filled with pies and cakes. Eventually the weather turns from fair to lightning and the girl falls ill with motion sickness, vomiting on the roofs of her neighbors’ houses. After Cara’s win, Mom set her hopes on Cara becoming a writer. Mom thought maybe I’d be an actress.
    Ronald Milligan was the teacher who changed the course of my life. An ex-hippie with long white hair receding at the crown who taught in blue jeans and T-shirts, he was rumored to smoke weed and attend anarchist meetings; he was never afraid to swear in class or frown at football players. He’d ridden his bicycle across the country and back twice, raised a daughter who was a war reporter for CNN, and married and loved another English teacher at our school, Mrs. Legge, whose graying blond hair hung nearly to her knees. She was stern and big-eyed, his perfect opposite.
    Ron Milligan was the hero I’d been waiting for.
    He insisted that his students call him Ron. He taught me about Wounded Knee and Emma Goldman, kept me reading Steinbeck and Faulkner and attended to my class journal as if it were the greatest literature he’d read. I wrote three times as many pages as were required and turned them in every two weeks for comment. I went from writing about symbols and plot to exploring my relationship with my father and my seemingly bottomless fears.
    When college application time rolled around, Ron helped me prepare the list of choices for the meeting with Mrs. Fairbank, the guidance counselor.
    My mother went along with me and Cara to our meeting with Mrs. Fairbank, who welcomed us in and pulled out the list of colleges she had compiled, reading out the names of the more selective state schools that she had calculated were in our budget.
    I had other ideas.
    “By my calculations,” I told her, “we can afford Smith or Vassar or Bard.” I pulled the list from my purse. I showed her that all of these schools offered aid for less-well-off students. Ron had even helped prepare pie charts. “Given that we’ll both attend at the same time, we’ll certainly be given scholarships. It will cost less than state school.”
    Mom looked at my figures and ran her tongue over her teeth. She always does this while she considers something important. “I was thinking more along the lines of community college,” Mom said, “Like I did. It makes good sense.”
    I gasped dramatically, as only a teenager not getting her way can. “We’re not like you,” I said. I looked over at Cara and she nodded in agreement.
    “We need you to get the most bang for your buck,” Mom said matter-of-factly.
    “Bang for your buck?” I repeated, certain that other Bard College parents would never refer to financing their children’s education that way. I