May, 1983. With summa cum laude in English in hand, I had finally enrolled in graduate school, part time, evenings, worked, part time weekends, and worked full time as a staff assistant and junior systems administrator for the fundraising arm of Public Television in Boston, WGBH. I was studying foreign literature, specializing in modern German literature in seminars on Kafka and Mann in the School of Arts and Sciences at Harvard, tutoring 3 nights a week with Amy Wissinger, PhD candidate in the German Language and Literature program, and had in my sights the secret plan of my life: to abandon spouse and stepson and escape to Tübingen University and become a suicidal German scholar. Spring 1983 was the seminar in Kafka and Mann and I had published my monograph on the mystical significance of the French allegory, the Romance of the Rose.
We lived in a tiny garret apartment in north Cambridge, Massachusetts, and I was finally making enough money to move us to a larger apartment, one with actual ceilings instead of eaves, five blocks away, for a whopping $395 a month. I might be able to convince my husband to actually get a job to help support our more posh lifestyle that involved a dining room and full sized oven.
My husband, 14 years older than I, had not worked at a job since moving in with me after my 18th birthday in 1978. Working two jobs, finally clearing an amazing $22,000 a year between the day, evening, and weekend, I could afford both graduate school and the apartment. And I somehow didn't think I was doing quite enough for my family. Hence the secret escape plan, which was hidden, even from myself most of the time. He threatened suicide almost weekly. I worked harder. Somehow, there was never enough work to give him enough distractions to please him.
Looking back, it is not a pleasant memory.
