A Singular Woman - Janny Scott [82]
By the fall of 1978, Barry was seventeen and a senior at Punahou in his last year at home in Hawaii. Ann had never found the distance separating them easy, commuting between continents and trying to remain engaged in his life. Now his childhood was coming to a close. Nancy Peluso, Ann’s friend from Yogyakarta, told me she remembered meeting Ann earlier that year in a small hotel in the southern part of Yogyakarta. They made a practice of getting together when they were both in town—to eat dinner, catch up, get a massage. On this occasion, Peluso recalled, Ann broke into tears. “She just started crying,” Peluso said. “And she said, ‘You know, I’ve got to go back to the U.S. for the last year that Barry is in high school. I really want to do that. After that, he’s gone and I won’t have any chance to experience that. I just want to be back there.’”
So she returned to Honolulu for several months that fall. In a haunting scene from Dreams from My Father, Obama describes a confrontation between mother and son during that visit. A friend of his has been arrested for drug possession. Ann confronts Obama, with the intensity of a parent fearing that the opportunity to influence her nearly adult child is running out. His grades are dropping, she says; he has yet to start his college applications. Isn’t he being a bit cavalier about his future? In a manner at first patronizing, then hostile, he brushes Ann off. He tries an old gambit—a smile, a few reassuring words, the verbal equivalent of a pat on the head. When Ann is not appeased, he informs her that he is thinking of not going away for college, just staying in Hawaii, taking a few classes, working part-time. She cuts him off: He could get into any college he wanted, she tells him, if he would make a little effort. He cannot just sit around like a good-time Charlie, counting on luck. “I looked at her sitting there, so earnest, so certain of her son’s destiny . . .” Obama writes. “I suddenly felt like puncturing that certainty of hers, letting her know that her experiment with me had failed.”
Instead of shouting, he laughs.
“A good-time Charlie, huh? Well, why not? Maybe that’s what I want out of life. I mean, look at Gramps. He didn’t even go to college.”
Obama realizes, from Ann’s expression, that he has stumbled upon her worst fear.
“‘Is that what you’re worried about?’ I asked. ‘That I’ll end up like Gramps?’” Then, having done his best to sabotage her faith in him, Obama walks out of the room.
One can only imagine how Ann took that exchange. She came from a family of teachers, though neither of her parents had received a college degree. Her mother, regretting her own decisions, had gone to extraordinary lengths to ensure that Ann, then Barry, would have the education and the opportunities that she had missed. The University of Hawai‘i had thrown wide Ann’s horizons—emotionally, intellectually, and professionally. For Barry to have the same chances, she had accepted their living half a world apart. She could not have helped worrying about the toll of that aching separation on the connection between them. Ann had the highest expectations for her son; she had emphasized from his earliest years the value of education and hard work. Now, to spite her, he was professing to reject both.
What was Ann’s