What Not to Wear (and Other Things No One Tells You When You’re a First-Generation College Graduate)

“My father could do no more than snap a picture.”

I do not own any soft, pretty, white dresses. I probably never will. Every time I spot one, all I can think is, That could have been The Dress.

If you’re a young woman in her early twenties graduating from a certain kind of tiny, elite liberal arts college in the Northeast, the graduation dress represents a rite of passage. A carryover from the boarding school past shared by many students, it is a very specific kind of dress, a white or cream-colored or pale pastel shift, simple and strapless.

Coming from a public school in Miami, the graduation dress was a tradition I did not learn about until it was too late—until I was standing in line, in alphabetical order, wearing a too bright, too casual, not particularly flattering red-and-white-polka-dotted “Minnie Mouse dress” (as my mother later dubbed it, when looking through the handful of pictures my father managed to take that day). In the middle of that brick courtyard, surrounded by buildings older than the country from which my parents had fled, I remember feeling thankful for the weight and length of our thick black Commencement gowns; for the way mine hid all traces of unintentional Disney-infused childhood nostalgia on the day I was supposed to be coming into my adulthood.

*

My first day at college was nothing like what TV had promised me. There was no carefully packed minivan or raucous family escort into the chaotic, half-empty cement dorms. Instead, I hopped on a plane in Miami with a single suitcase and a backpack and arrived on campus alone, before the rest of the student body, for a pre-orientation program designed to give first-generation students time to adjust before everyone else flooded in. My first day there was a quiet one, spent neatly unpacking my belongings and then taking a bus to the nearest Walmart to get the rest of the things I needed. While most incoming students were trailed by parents fussing over their dorm room organization, I took care of my to-do list on my own.

My last day of college was nothing like what I’d expected, either. There was no first-generation orientation for Commencement weekend; no one to prepare me for the jarring collision of the home my dad brought with him and the bubble I’d spent four years building; no instructions for the day I learned, suddenly and grotesquely, that the American ideal of upward mobility is a solo mission.

In a way, it came as a relief to me when the weekend was pitched to us as a time for friends rather than family. There were dozens of school-sanctioned parties and seniors-only events; an entire week was devoted to a road trip to Hilton Head for our last drunken hurrah before returning to campus to do more of the same, in nicer clothes. But I had either forgotten, or was never prepared for, the descent of the New England elite upon the campus—and how much everything, and everyone, changed in their presence. The old women in sun hats and small children felt misplaced, but even more startling were my own classmates’ transformations. The place where we had lived with our unofficial dress code of black and grey North Face and sweatpants was suddenly overrun with pastel. A different sundress for every day of the week! Beyond the unexpected Easter vibes that left me scrambling in friends’ closets, I overheard students talking about accommodations and BBQs, debating where to hold dinner with their friends and family—at the refurbished farm house one set of parents had rented for the weekend? Or the cute inn another had bought out for the occasion (which had a pool)?

I had known a few months out that my mother wouldn’t be there for my graduation. Stuck between visas and embassies, her absence was explained once and never mentioned again. My dad arrived the day before Commencement, in a rental car he drove in from Albany an hour away. That night I took him to my favorite restaurant for wings and the novel first beer with his of-age daughter. It was surprisingly easy to find a table for two. He got surprisingly buzzed. And I was surprised to discover the all-consuming, ferocious sense of protectiveness I felt toward my father.

The lone representative from the immediate family nucleus, unable to speak English, he spent the one night he was there tucked away in the furthest corner of the campus, in the freshman dorms the college had set aside for the parents of first-generation and lower-income students (for whom a weekend at a local inn would be “a hardship”). Depositing my father at the opposite end of campus in a threadbare, single-occupancy dorm felt like an almost violent act of separation. He called me about an hour into his stay; he couldn’t find the bathroom. Then he got disoriented on his way back to his room. I talked him through it; he made a joke about “experiencing” college, and said goodnight.

The next morning, waiting in line, I looked at my father in the crowd. I tried to smile at him, but his scanning eyes could not find a place to land in the thicket of gowns. In a suit jacket that hung too loosely from weight he’d lost too quickly, he wandered this unfamiliar place with just a camera for company, mostly taking pictures of trees and the old brick row houses. Smiling, and by all accounts having the time of his life, but still . . . the guilt I’d kept at bay for the past four years—for leaving, for not visiting enough, for not sharing this life I was building around me and then springing it on him in the span of two days, right at the end—made him difficult to look at.

My father is nothing if not a proud, stubborn man. But that day I recalled how, every couple of years, he would decide it was time he learn this language once and for all and sit down with his books and DVDs; how he’d hear the way his tongue strangled the words and, painfully aware of how he must sound to other people, he’d slam the books shut and hide them away again in a quiet corner of the house. This same man was now taking pictures of the most mundane things—the trashed, half-empty dorm; the rental car he had driven up; a pile of books I couldn’t take on the plane with me, but refused to get rid of—all to share with my mother, six thousand kilometers away, calling her when he learned some interesting new fact about my school that could not be photographed. His simple joy was what killed me. For once, he felt no embarrassment; he did not shy away from the words he could not pronounce, but repeated them until he committed them all to memory: names of buildings, and streets, and professors he would never see again.

He missed the hand-off of the diploma; he couldn’t quite follow the ceremony while trying to narrate it to my mother over the phone. They both heard my name being called, my father standing in the erected bleachers, my mother from the house in Nicaragua—but he said he couldn’t see me, couldn’t scramble fast enough to get the camera ready.

That day, constantly whisked away to stand in yet another line, for yet another procession or ceremony, I mostly saw my father from a distance. I had never stood here before, looking at my father surrounded by my classmates in their light, misty dresses and khaki pants; had never had a chance to see myself, my family, the way others might. Somewhere along the line, in the flurry of niceties and ceremonies, with my father relegated to the sidelines of my peripheral vision, that weekend made clear the very thing I had been denying for the past four years: I was being subsumed by something else, going to a place where my family could not follow. I stood out like hell, a polka-dotted dress in a sea of white, but there I was, still in it. Still a part of it. And he could do no more than snap a picture.

I wanted to run my father under cover, hide him from this thing he had yet to notice. I knew on some level that he was immensely proud of me, but I also felt, for the first time, the fear of translation and everything that might be lost in it. When everyone spilled onto the lawn after the ceremony, diplomas in hand, posing for pictures, I fled. I grabbed a plate of tiny sandwiches, careful to not get anything on my newly acquired $200,000 piece of paper, and I got my dad out of there—out of a desire to protect or to hide, for his sake or for my own, I still don’t know.

*

Thankfully, now, Graduation Day is just a Sunday I try to not think about too much. But it took me about a year to stop obsessively opening emails and magazines from stores I never shopped at in hopes of finding The Dress. If I could at least identify what the right one would have been, I kept thinking, maybe I could brush off my outlier of a dress as a choice—some small act of rebellion.

Now, whenever my mother looks at the two or three graduation pictures on my father’s computer—because there is no framed portrait or blown-up image hanging on any walls—all the illusions break down. I see the blame spiral start at her eyes, tunneling downwards to her gut. I want to tell her that I barely noticed she wasn’t there, I was so busy; I want to tell her it’s commonplace, just undergrad, just another silly ceremony no one will remember. She hates how few pictures there are from that day, but part of me is thankful for my father’s distraction, because that means there is less evidence to tally my mother’s absence.

When I think of that day now, I think of oceans and distance and strength; of how different it was from how any of us ever imagined. I point to the dress, and my mom shakes her head.

“Pero Sorayita,” she says, “de verdad ese vestido?”

But she laughs every time.