That next fall I pulled up to the middle school, let her out of the car on the first day of school, and reminded her she would be riding home on bus eleven. She leaned over and kissed me on the cheek. “Don’t cry, Mom,” she said. “It’ll be okay.” I blinked tears away and watched her walk toward a new phase of life with confidence and even excitement.
As for me, despite this trauma I drove away with my own little sense of excitement. I find it difficult to sleep the night before school starts, eager to see the brand-new class that will be waiting for me the following morning.
At the end of that first week, Clay dropped by after school to see how I was managing. I sat at my desk grading a set of papers, laughing.
“What’s so funny?” he asked.
“Students!” I said.
“I’m glad you have a good bunch this year,” he said, then lingered long enough to read the work of several choice specimens.
He came by again maybe a month later.
“Are you still worried about me?” I asked.
“Not really. You’re a trouper. I was in a meeting with your principal and the compensation committee, and since you usually work late on Fridays, I thought I’d see how it’s going.”
“It’s going fine,” I said, putting my grade book in my tote bag.
He looked at my bulletin board of assignments and asked if my students were proving to be as interesting as I had initially thought.
“They are,” I said. “Come look.” I showed him a bulletin board full of creative new endings for familiar phrases.
Once again Clay remained awhile, studying the board until he declared the winner.
It was not long after that visit that I began to wonder if he’d stop by when I stayed late on any given Friday, and then I began to hope he would. It was much later that year that I found myself looking for his car at the administration building when I drove by on my way home. When had that started? And what was it all about? I suppose I should have recognized that as a subtle indication that all was no longer right in my world.
One Friday the spring of that same year, Clay sat on the edge of my desk, telling me about a mother at the high school basketball game the week before who’d thrown a box of popcorn at a referee.
“What did he do?” I asked, wishing I’d been there.
While he was telling me, I looked up to see Paula standing in the doorway. She sort of did a double take, and when Clay followed my gaze and saw Paula, so did he. Clay said he guessed he had passed on enough local color for one day, stood up, and as he left, told both of us ladies to have a nice weekend.
When he was gone, Paula still stood in the doorway, looking at me, not saying a word—a step up from a pregnant pause.
“What?” I said.
“I don’t know, Kendy, honey,” she said, finally moving toward my desk, picking up a pencil that had fallen on the floor and handing it to me. “I just don’t walk into many classrooms and find the superintendent of schools sitting on the edge of a teacher’s desk like that.”
“How many teachers are married to his nephew?”
“I’m just saying that it looked—I don’t know—strange, I guess.”
I was embarrassed for a reason I couldn’t quite name, but I was also defensive. “Goodness, Paula, you know Clay is the epitome of decorum.”
“I know he always has been.”
I had forgotten I was giving Paula a ride home that day, and I slipped a book I needed to read for Monday into my tote with the rest of my things and told her we’d better get going. On the way home we talked about the usual, the kids and what we were going to do over the weekend, but when she got out, she leaned back into the car and said, “Kendy, just be careful.”
Be careful?
“Don’t worry,” I said.
Looking back, I think Paula’s early concern, expressed so sweetly, was one of many ways the Holy Spirit tried to intervene, the first of several intervention attempts. But that did not occur to me at the time.
Later, when I knew things were “out of hand” (don’t we love euphemisms?), when I crossed first the line of propriety and then the line that separates right from wrong, I pretty much shut her out, which wasn’t all that hard to do, we were both so busy with our families and our work. And besides, at first I thought there was nothing behind the door I closed on her. Then, when I was quite sure it was something, I was too horrified to discuss it, and eventually, it was something I wanted to keep to myself, a secret to invigorate my days.
I look back on that woman and can hardly fathom her foolishness.
Maisey
Since we are so close, Marcus and I are stopping by the travel agency to see Grandma and Grandpa. I feel a tingle of excitement as we drive up to the shingled building with friendly shutters and a veranda-like porch. When Marcus and I enter the front door, good memories wash over me. Though I haven’t come here often since I left Indiana for college, I was a regular before that.
As soon as we walk through the door, I spot my favorite person in the place, not counting my grandparents, of course. I take Marcus’s hand and rush him over to the desk of Rowena Presley, my grandparents’ able and robust assistant. Rowena thinks she is Elvis Presley’s distant cousin and keeps a sign on her desk that says,
Don’t be cruel.
She says that’s good advice for her and anyone else who approaches her desk.
I start around the desk to give her a hug, but she puts up her hand to stop me. Then she grabs her jar of jelly beans from the top of her desk and puts it in the bottom drawer. I laugh, and she stands up and catches me into a bear hug that lifts me off the floor. She hugs Marcus too, the friendliest introduction he has experienced yet, though she doesn’t hoist
him
from the floor. She returns to her chair, retrieves the jelly beans, and offers them to Marcus.
“I always hide them when Maisey comes in,” she says, “because when she was two or three she confiscated the jar while those of us who should have been watching her talked about some kind of urgent business—at least we like to think it was urgent. Leave it to that girl to sit under my desk and devour every one of the jelly beans in a jar filled to the brim. We probably would have had her stomach pumped, except she proceeded to throw up all over my favorite shoes.”
“True,” I say, smiling at Marcus, who chooses just two yellows and a green.
“Kids!” Grandpa shouts. He has spied us through the glass in his office door and is beckoning us in.
Leaving Rowena and her jelly beans to join Grandpa, I tell her I hope to see her Saturday. Her response I could have guessed: “Fire-breathing dragons couldn’t keep me away, darlin’!”
Grandpa gives us the
bad news that Grandma didn’t come in today. “She’s having fun doing some last-minute shopping for the big weekend,” he explains. “I don’t much want to go home and tell her she’s missed seeing you two.”
We talk about the wedding awhile and look at more pictures of our accommodations on Maui, and then Marcus asks me to wait for him in the car so he can talk to Grandpa about a little surprise he wants to arrange for me on our honeymoon trip. I tell him I’ll just chat with Rowena, but he says he wants me out of the building.
So I’m banished to the car with a bottle of cold water and a promise that Marcus won’t be long. He’d better not be, or we’ll run out of gas. Even though we’re parked in the shade, I have the car running and the air-conditioner blasting away.
I use Marcus’s phone to call Gram, but her phone goes to voice mail. She must be in a meeting. I really don’t have anything to say, which might have irritated her some. But not too much—she’s gotten used to being pretty nice to me. I think Mother is surprised at how much time I’ve spent with her.
When I made the choice to attend Washington University in St. Louis, I can’t think of one person here who was particularly happy about it. Jackie, Heidi, and Caitlin said it did not compute. Jackie waffled between supportive and disgusted and argued with me about it off and on until the day I drove away, leaving her standing in the driveway with my parents. They weren’t thrilled either, of course. Dad was vocal in his opposition, saying it was hard enough having his only child leave home without her going across two states. Mom’s disapproval—I suppose that’s what you’d call it—demonstrated itself in her utter silence on the subject.
One evening the summer after I graduated, I overheard her talking to Dad on the patio about how strange my decision seemed to her. He told Mom that she had made the same strange decision when she chose Butler University, also two states away from her home. But she didn’t think her choice was strange at all—she had spent months in Indiana during junior high and high school, and she would be with Paula, her best friend. Besides, Butler was Margaret’s alma mater, and Margaret had decided to move to Indiana to be near her sister when Mother came here to college. Mother said her choice had made sense; mine didn’t.
Even Gram was surprised. At my high school graduation party, she said the first and only thing that resembled support: She told Mother that she had wanted
her
to go to Washington University.
As long as I can remember, we visited Gram in St. Louis twice a year without fail, and she visited us twice a year unless something made it impossible, which happened a few times. Dad liked to plan our visits to Gram’s around ball games, and Mom checked out concert schedules when it was getting close to time for a visit. Our concert tastes were eclectic. We attended the philharmonic orchestra, but we also stood up and jammed with everyone from Garth Brooks to Coldplay.
When we visited St. Louis, Gram usually took us out to eat at very nice places, and she endured most of the concerts and even a few ball games. I liked St. Louis, and I thought going to school there would be an adventure. Plus, I thought Gram needed someone besides fellow employees and something besides work in her life for a change, even if she didn’t know it.
But this I know: My mother was the main reason I went to college in St. Louis. I think what Marcus said yesterday is probably true. For the most part, I don’t deliberately try to hurt her. But did I get in my car and take myself to a place she had left twenty-five years earlier because I knew how much it would hurt her?
I don’t know.
Maybe. And if so, what does that mean?
Marcus might conclude I have appointed myself her prosecutor, judge, and jury. Maybe Dad would say the same thing. I certainly didn’t think of it that way, but if that’s the case, is that so awful? Would there have been a shred of justice otherwise?
Regardless of my motives, I did like St. Louis and the university, and I’m glad I made that choice. I’m not sure how much I would have seen Gram if I hadn’t been so lonely my freshman year. One Saturday I just called her up and asked if she wanted company. When she hesitated, I told her I’d stop and get a movie and a pizza, not thinking that she probably wouldn’t want either of them. But finally she said, “That sounds fine, Maize.”
After that I went over at least once a month. By my sophomore year, she was letting my college friend Sarah come along on my monthly visits, and by my junior and senior years I came every two or three weeks, sometimes with Marcus, Sarah, and her current boyfriend. When we were all there, Gram generally had reading to do in her bedroom, though one night she played Pictionary with us, staying up long past her bedtime. She stocked her condo with our favorite snacks, and that gesture, along with the flat-screen television mounted over the fireplace, and the view from her patio, kept us coming.
I remember Mother saying she never had friends over when she lived at home and that if Gram had finished the work she brought home and Mom had finished her homework, they capped the night off with store-bought cookies and a good book for each of them. In my opinion, Mother should have been a little more pushy. This year Gram has been downright friendly, getting me the internship with her company and then a job, and helping me find a wedding dress and an apartment.
She actually took me to lunch one of the days we looked for my dress. She seemed sort of sad that day. She said she hadn’t had time to help Mom shop for a dress, but she was glad that all these years later she could help her daughter’s daughter. I said I was glad too. That day she also mentioned retirement, which apparently isn’t that far away, and she gave me the impression that she could think of nothing less desirable. I believe her exact words were, “I think I would prefer death to retirement.” And looking at her across the linen tablecloth, I had the awful feeling she wasn’t kidding.
And really, what
will
she do? Well, she got me my job, so I’m just going to have to hook her up with some kind of volunteer work before Marcus and I leave St. Louis. She’s gone to church with me a few times. That’s good. Maybe I can help her see there is life outside of her job. God will have to intervene, though, because as Marcus’s mother would say, she’ll be a hard nut to crack.
My vision of my grandmother vanishes when Marcus knocks rather loudly on the window. I don’t sit in the car without a few precautions: the radio or my iPod blaring, the air-conditioner on—at least in the summer—and the doors safely locked against kidnappers and killers.
“You’ve been keeping me waiting a lot today,” I say when I unlock the door for him.
He settles himself behind the steering wheel. “We’re a long way from even!”
I smile at him and give him a quick kiss. You don’t hear anyone complaining about my choice of colleges these days. If I hadn’t attended Washington University, I wouldn’t have met Marcus Blair, and that’s too awful to think about.
Kendy
It is not as sharp, as brutally focused, as it once was, but unfortunately, the summer before Maisey started seventh grade still stands out in my memory. What has made me literally sick is knowing that at that point I had a chance to avert disaster, but I did not take it.
School wasn’t out long at all before I became aware that I missed my talks with Clay. That’s how I put it to myself. Of course it was Clay himself I missed. Being “seen,” being so obviously cared for, being appreciated so thoroughly, these things are exhilarating, and they are addictive. I saw him, as usual, at family get-togethers, but that wasn’t the same.