Ursula Le Guin: Very Far Away from Anywhere Else

I think my mother understood all that, but in a way that wasn’t any use to me. My mother was and is a good wife. Being a good wife and mother is the important thing in her life. And she is a good wife and mother. She never lets my father down. She rides him about some things, of course, but she never sneers at him or cuts him down, the way I’ve heard women do to their husbands; in all the big things she backs him up—what he does is right. And she keeps the house clean and cooks really well and makes extra stuff like cookies and granola, and when you want a clean shirt there is one, and when Muscular Dystrophy or March of Dimes wants a coordinator or a door-to-door collector she does it. And if you think all that, running even a small family and house so that things are decent and peaceful, is a small job, maybe you ought to try it for a year or two. She works hard and uses her head at it. But the trouble is, she’s afraid of doing anything else, of being anything else. Not afraid for herself, I think, but afraid that if she did anything except look after us, she’d be letting us down—letting the side down, not being a good wife and mother. She feels she’s got to be always there. She can’t even take off the time it takes to read a novel. I think she doesn’t read novels because if she got really interested in one, absorbed, then she’d be somewhere else, by herself: she wouldn’t be with us. And that’s wrong, to her. So all she ever reads are some magazines about food and interior decorating and one about extremely expensive holiday travel to places she doesn’t want to go to. My father watches a lot of TV, but she never pays much attention to it; she may be sitting there with him in the living room, but she’s sewing or doing crewelwork or figuring out household stuff or working on March of Dimes lists. Ready to get up and do what needs doing.

She didn’t spoil me, more than an only kid always gets spoiled by being the center of attention. She used to try to keep me from reading so much, but she sort of gave up when I was twelve or thirteen. As far back as I can remember, I had to keep my room straight and do garden jobs. I do the lawn and carry out trash and so on. Male jobs only, of course. I never learned how to work the washer and dryer till the time she had to have an operation and couldn’t climb stairs for two weeks. I don’t think my father knows how to work them yet. That’s woman’s work. It’s funny, really, because he’s nuts about machines. All our appliances have to have about twelve different cycles and all possible attachments. If he ever bought the plain ordinary model of anything he’d feel he wasn’t treating her right. But if they’re household work machines, she runs them. And when they break down, she calls the repairman. My father doesn’t like to hear about things breaking down.

That’s why I couldn’t say anything about the car. Because it had really broken me down. It just was the end, the last stop. I had to get off. But there wasn’t anything outside the bus but rain and fog and me jumping up and down doing an ape act and nobody looking or hearing.

I came in from the bus stop that day. My mother was in the kitchen blending something in the blender. She yelled something over the scream of the machine but I couldn’t hear what. I went up to my room and dropped my knapsack and took off my coat with the wet collar and stood there. The rain was whacking on the roof. I said, “I am an intellectual. I am an intellectual. I am an intellectual. And the rest of you can go to hell!”

I heard my voice and it sounded unbelievably feeble. Big deal! So I was an intellectual, and what else is new? That’s when the fog closed in completely. And that’s when I found the rock. It was actually like that, as if my hand closed around a solid, round rock. The girl on the bus saying, “Yeah,” in that solid, round voice. Yeah: good. So go ahead and be what you are.

So when I had rubbed some of the rain out of my hair with a towel, I sat down at my desk and started to reread Ornstein’s The Psychology of Consciousness . Because something like that, thinking about how we actually think, how our heads work, is what I would like to do.

But it didn’t last. I dropped the rock. At dinner my father got going about how you break in a new car. You should drive it at moderate speeds every day, and going to and from school would be perfect for it. “If you want me to take it to work for a week or so, of course I’ll be glad to,” he said. “It’s not good for a new car just to sit there.”

“OK,” I said, “you do that.”

That blew it. His face got tight. “If you didn’t want the car, you might have told me.”

“You never asked me if I wanted a car.”

His face got tighter, like a clenched fist. He said, “It’s been driven very little. I suppose the dealer might take it back. Not for the full cost, of course. They couldn’t resell it as new.”

“Oh rubbish, what a notion,” my mother said. “How is Owen to get back and forth from State every day next year without a car of his own? It would take him an hour each way on the bus. For goodness sakes, Jim, don’t expect him to start living in the car right off! If you want to drive it to the office, do. But it’ll get plenty of use next year!”

That was fine. My mother is a highly intelligent person. She had just given my father his first practical reason for giving me a car—his excuse, his justification. State University is clear on the other edge of our city, about ten miles from where we live. I would certainly need a car to get to classes there next year. The only trouble was that State was not where I wanted to go to college.

But if I brought that up, if I said, “What if I go away to college?” I’d have blown it again. We’d have had two quarrels going instead of one. Because it was my mother who was dead set on my going to State. And I do mean dead set. She’d gone there, she met dad there, she quit as a junior to get married. Beverley, her best friend, was a sorority sister. She knew State. It was safe. The places I wanted to go weren’t safe. They were far away, and she didn’t understand what went on at them; they were full of communists and radicals and intellectuals.

I had applied to MIT, Cal Tech, and Princeton, as well as State. My father had filled out the scholarship applications and paid the application fees. The forms were incredible, all in quadruplicate, but being a CPA, he rather enjoyed filling them out clearly and honestly, and he didn’t mind the fees because I think he took some pride in my shooting for the moon. I expect he mentioned to his friends at the office that his son was applying to Princeton. That was something to be proud of, especially if I didn’t actually go there. But he said nothing about it to my mother, as far as I know, and she said nothing about it to either of us. If we wanted to throw away ninety dollars on fees, all right. But her son was going to State.

And she had a practical reason. A very sound one. They could afford to send me there.

I didn’t say anything. I couldn’t. My jaws locked. I couldn’t swallow the piece of pot roast I’d been working on, either. It just lay there in my mouth, a fibrous sort of lump. I couldn’t chew it. I worked it over to one side, and drank some milk around it, and after a long time I managed to chew it some and swallow it. After a longer time dinner was over. I went up to do homework.

It was no good. Why should I study? What for? I could get to State without studying. I could probably get clear through State without studying. I could probably go on and become an accountant or a tax auditor or a math teacher and be respectable and successful and get married and have a family and buy a house and get old and die without ever studying, without ever thinking at all. Why not? A lot of other people did. You think you’re so special, Griffiths.