MARIANNA DE MARCO TORCOVNICK
463
counselor has recommended the secretarial track; when I protested, the
conference with my parents was arranged. My mother's preference is clear:
the secretarial track - college is for boys; I will need to make a "good living"
until I marry and have children. My father also prefers the secretarial track,
but he wavers, half proud of my aberrantIy high scores, half worried. I press
the attack, saying that if I were Jewish I would have been placed, without
question, in the academic track. I tell him I have sneaked a peek at my files
and know that my
I.
Q.
is genius level. I am allowed to insist on the change
into the academic track.
What I did, and I was ashamed of it even then, was to play upon my
father's competitive feelings with Jews: his daughter could and should be as
good as theirs. In the bank where he was a messenger and the insurance
company where he worked in the mail room, my father worked with Jews,
who were almost always his immediate supervisors. Several times, my fa–
ther was offered the supervisory job but turned it down, after long
conversations with my mother about the dangers of making a change, the
difficulty of giving orders to friends. After her work in a local garment shop,
after cooking dinner and washing the floor each night, my mother often did
piece work making bows; sometimes I would help her for fun, but it
wasn't
fun, and I was free to stop while she continued for long, tedious hours to in–
crease the family income. Once a week, her part-time boss, Dave, would
come by to pick up the boxes of bows. Short, round, with his shirt-tails slop–
pily tucked into his pants and a cigar almost always dangling from his lips,
Dave was a stereotyped Jew but also, my parents always said, a nice guy, a
decent man.
Years later, similar choices come up, and I show the same assertiveness
I showed with my father, the same ability to deal for survival, but tinged
with Bensonhurst caution. Where will I go to college? Not to Brooklyn Col–
lege, the flagship of the city system - I know that, but don't press the invita–
tions I have received to apply to prestigious schools outside of New York.
The choice comes down to two: Barnard, which gives me a full scholarship,
minus five hundred dollars a year that all scholarship students are expected
to contribute from summer earnings, or New York University, which offers
me one thousand dollars above tuition as a bribe. I waver. My parents stand
firm: they are already losing money by letting me go to college; lowe it to
the family
to
contribute the extra thousand dollars plus my summer earnings.
Besides, my mother adds, harping on a favorite theme, there are no boys at
Barnard; at N. Y. U. I'm more likely to meet someone
to
marry. I go
to
N.
Y. U. and do marry in my senior year, but he is someone I didn't meet at
college. I was secretly relieved, I now think (though at the time I thought I
was just placating my parents' conventionality), to be out of the marriage
