They were so cute when they were asleep. Awake was a different story. Awake, the twins were extremely tall—a mysterious surfacing of genes, probably from Matt’s side of the family, that made it feel like a pair of Swedish exchange students had come to stay on a permanent basis. And they were moody. The moodiness was combined with a stubborn opaqueness, so Mary Ellen never knew which mood she might be dealing with, or what might cause that mood to suddenly change.
She reached out to tap Shelby’s arm, then changed her mind. It was still early. She was excited to start the campus tour, but she wanted to start it on the right foot, and waking the twins prematurely usually wasn’t a good idea. She pulled her phone from her bag and sent the girls a text: “Having breakfast downstairs. Come down when you’re ready.”
The breakfast room was full of families, and as Mary Ellen looked around at the other high school seniors, she regretted having come downstairs without her daughters. At home, they always seemed to be on different schedules, eating separate meals, but this trip was supposed to be different—a chance for mother-daughter bonding. A chance for her to show the girls her alma mater and try to explain the formative power of her college years—years that had begun flooding into Mary Ellen’s consciousness with startling, sun-dazzled clarity ever since the UNC viewbook had arrived in the mail.
That was all so long ago, but now it seemed like a terrible oversight that she hadn’t ever told her girls what she’d been like in college. Could Sydney and Shelby even begin to imagine her as that careless, overall-wearing art major, a girl without a thought in her head about the real world, dancing like a snake in a basket, hypnotized by the music of the here and now? A child, really, who loved smearing paint around and playing Frisbee on the quad and availing herself of the unlimited soft-serve ice cream in the cafeteria.
Mary Ellen took some low-fat yogurt from the breakfast bar and poured herself a cup of coffee. That girl would be unrecognizable to anyone who knew her today—pearl-wearing, feet-on-the-ground Mary Ellen, with her tailored jackets and her sculpted hair; her proficiency with PowerPoint and conference room projectors; her command of pharmaceutical positioning statements. She sat down and peeled the top off the yogurt, scraping the underside of the lid with her spoon. She’d done all right for herself in the end, thanks to her parents’ wisdom and encouragement.
At her father’s funeral last year, someone had said, “You were the best daughter he could have asked for,” and it was true. She was, in fact, the exact daughter he had asked for. Her father had made a special point of coming to Chapel Hill toward the end of her sophomore year, taking her to dinner at L’Auberge and gently suggesting that it was time to switch to her “real” major. Over a meal of steak au poivre and green beans sprinkled with sliced almonds, he’d wondered aloud whether, given her creative spirit, marketing might be a good fit.
Mary Ellen had seen the wisdom in this right away, had come to her senses without any fuss. Her parents had friends in biotech, so introductions were made and internships were lined up. She’d landed a job at Gallard right after graduation, and now here she was, thirty years later: vice president of marketing, in charge of the world’s leading analgesic, Numbitol, a product whose blue-and-yellow caplets brought comfort and relief to millions of Americans every single day.
She left the breakfast room and sat on a sofa in the lobby, marveling at the way life can turn on a moment, a conversation, a dinner, and how utterly unaware you can be while it’s happening. Had there been white tablecloths on the tables? Probably. Her father had massaged his earlobe while reading the menu, as he always did, and Mary Ellen had teased him about his suit—always so formal! She was pretty sure she remembered candlelight and wallpaper, but was she making that up to fill the gaps? It felt important to know.
She got up and asked at the front desk if L’Auberge was still around. It was; they would be happy to make a reservation for that evening. She hesitated a moment before agreeing, worried about the other memories, the more recent ones, which would probably intrude on her evening with the girls. But she was pretty good at keeping those thoughts at bay. Besides, tonight wasn’t about the past; it was about kicking off an exciting new phase in the girls’ lives. It was time to celebrate.
Where were they? She took out her phone and called the room; one of the girls, her voice fogged with sleep, answered after the twelfth or thirteenth ring.
“Are you up?”
“We are now.” It was Sydney.
“Get dressed and come to the lobby, all right? It’s getting late.”
“Why didn’t you wake us up?”
“That’s what I’m doing.”
“No, I mean—” Sydney made an exasperated sound. “Never mind. Goodbye.”
It was easier for Matt. He and the girls had sports—the glue that bonded them into a tidy, inseparable package. Ironically, this was Mary Ellen’s fault. When the girls were small, back when they still adored her, Mary Ellen had seen athletic activities as a way of leveling the playing field for Matt, giving him an opportunity to connect with the two long-haired, princess-and-pony-obsessed mini Mary Ellens. She was the one who’d signed them up for peewee soccer and volunteered Matt as assistant coach.
But before long, the field had tilted heavily in the other direction, and by the time the girls were twelve, sports had become all consuming. On most weekdays Matt would feed them an early dinner, then take them to practice, and Mary Ellen would come home to a house piled high with the evidence of family life—bulging backpacks, dirty dishes, and great, tangled drifts of shoes—but no actual family.
And in truth, she didn’t always hate it, the opportunity to mix a martini in an empty house after a long day of meetings and conference calls. But it had taken its toll over the years. Travel meets, team dinners, scrimmages, summer camps… The distance between herself and her family had widened slowly over time, like the gap between the first two steps of their marble stoop—barely noticeable at first, then more concerning as it filled with ice in the winter and sprouted weeds in the summer, until one day, to Mary Ellen’s shock, she came home to find their first step tipped forward onto the sidewalk, a lawsuit waiting to happen.
But really, what was the point in dwelling on the past? She’d made sacrifices, yes, but somebody had to do it. Otherwise, how could this life ever have come to be? Who would have paid for Penn Charter and ski lessons and the trips to Mexico? Who would have bought their five-story row house in Center City Philadelphia and financed the new kitchen and bathrooms? Not Matt, God bless him; his freelance writing had never even pulled in enough to pay their Whole Foods bill. Instead, he provided man-hours: overseeing the renovations, planning the vacations, taking the girls shopping for book bags, Valentine’s Day cards, and cleats.
The arrangement was seldom spoken of, with both of them afraid to upset the delicate balance: Mary Ellen trying to protect Matt’s ego, Matt trying to keep anything from changing, which appeared to be his goal in life. And somehow, it worked. At least, it worked better than what Mary Ellen had seen in those families with two working parents: kids raised by nannies, dogs walked by dog walkers, husbands and wives conducting marriages over Skype from hotel rooms and airport lounges.
The elevator chimed and the girls finally emerged, dressed in their usual sheepskin boots and leggings, mouths slick with lip gloss, jaws working away at wads of gum. “There you are!” Mary Ellen exclaimed. “I thought I was going to have to send a search party.”
She hurried the girls through breakfast and into the rental car. Turning onto South Road, she felt her pulse quicken at the sight of the familiar brick buildings and stone walls, the gracious walkways busy with young people. “My freshman dorm was over there!” she exclaimed, pointing toward a tree-lined quad. “And the library… Oh wow, look at all these new buildings.” She was disoriented for a moment, until she passed the rec center and the Hanes building. “That’s where the art studios were,” she said
. “Did I tell you I started out as an art major?”
“Yes,” the girls answered in unison.
Mary Ellen parked and gestured toward another stately, columned building. “Carroll Hall. Advertising and marketing.” She twisted around to look at the girls. “This is where it all began.”
“Awesome,” said Shelby, her thumb busy on her phone’s screen.
“It looks really nice, Mom,” Sydney said correctively from the back seat.
Mary Ellen led them up the wide stairs and through the double doors, the girls keeping their heads down, hands stuffed in their pockets, uncharacteristically shy in the presence of so many college kids. “Pretty soon you’ll be one of them,” Mary Ellen said with a smile, reaching out to tuck a stray lock behind Sydney’s ear. Sydney ducked away from her touch.
“Mom, I don’t think we’re going to take marketing,” Shelby said.
“I know. I just wanted to show you where I spent so much of my time when I was here.” Mary Ellen looked around, trying to get her bearings amid the hurried throngs of laptop-clutching students. “They renovated,” she said. She peeked into a lecture hall where students were watching a video on a large screen. None of it felt familiar; the light was flatter, the ceilings lower, and there was something off about the proportions of the place. She led the girls down another corridor, looking for details to furnish her admittedly vague memories of Intro to Communications Strategy and Product Development 101. “I think I took data management in here,” she said, pulling open a door. A bearded man looked up, startled, from his desk. “Oh, excuse me!”
“Mom!”
“Anyway,” Mary Ellen said, turning back the way they’d come. “It was all so long ago. Kind of a blur, really.” She peered through a few more classroom windows, wondering what, exactly, she was looking for—some heady surge of nostalgia? She’d attended classes here, taken notes, met with her study group, but there was nothing so magical about that. She’d come here wanting to give the girls a sense of the wide-openness of it all—the thrilling expanse of possibility that she somehow associated with her college years. This particular building, with its drop ceilings and fluorescent lighting, wasn’t up to the task.
“Let’s walk around outside,” she said, turning to her daughters who, she realized, were no longer with her. She made her way through the crowd of chattering students, muttering “Excuse me” while scanning for a pair of blond ponytails. She scrabbled in her bag for her phone, feeling a reflexive twinge of maternal worry, but then the crowd thinned and she caught sight of the girls at the other end of the corridor, leaned against a wall, heads bowed like a pair of swans over their screens.
“There you are,” Mary Ellen said. In one long, fluid matching movement the girls pulled their gaze up and outward, blackened their screens, and slipped their phones into their pockets. “What are you doing?”
“Nothing.”
“What do you say we go somewhere a little more interesting?” She gestured toward the door with her head, and the girls obediently levered themselves away from the wall and followed her into the brassy autumn sunshine.
The lower quad, upper quad, the Old Well, the library. Mary Ellen was relieved to find them all pretty much where she remembered them, still manicured and picturesque. All around them, young people either strode purposefully down the brick walkways or lounged in sunny patches on the walls and stairs. Mary Ellen searched the girls’ faces for signs of interest, but they were in full slack-faced camouflage, hiding behind a veil of nonchalance.
She found herself in front of the Hanes Art Center, its brick crenellations and vast window grids a tribute to the factory-obsessed eighties. “Let’s take a look at the art studios,” she said, not bothering to check if this merited any change in her daughters’ facial expressions. She pushed through the glass doors and sunlight followed them in, spreading itself across the floor with proprietary ease.
Mary Ellen climbed the stairs and found an empty studio with a circle of chairs arrayed around a low platform. “Oh,” she said, slowly entering the room, her hand on her chest. “I remember this. The models, they would sit there, all…you know.” She looked back at Sydney and Shelby and mock-whispered, “Naked!” The girls stared at her curiously. “Well, we didn’t see that kind of thing as often as…you know.” She waved toward their phones. “It took some getting used to.”
“You mean they’d sit there for you to draw?” Sydney asked. “Like, live?”
“Live, yes. It was called life drawing.”
The twins furrowed their brows. “I think I’d be too embarrassed to move,” Sydney said. “Much less draw.”
“Really? It’s not so different from a locker room, is it?”
Shelby made a face. “Yeah, but you don’t look.”
“Seriously, Mom, were you dying?”
Mary Ellen shrugged. “It was strange at first, but you just…get used to it. You start drawing, and all this stuff starts to, I don’t know, fall away. Your hang-ups.” She remembered it so clearly now: the grain of the paper, the charcoal smearing under her damp palm, the way the model’s body had floated apart into ridges and knolls and hollows, each shape a landscape unto itself. The frustrating, invigorating debate between her eye and her hand as she groped around for the truth. It was only when she let go of her idea of a torso, her notion of a neck, that she really began to see. “I loved it,” she said, running her hand along the back of one of the chairs.
Some students began trickling into the room, so Mary Ellen took the girls down the hall to see the painting studio, a printmaking shop, a small gallery of student work. The air was thick with linseed fumes and the chalky smell of gesso, and Mary Ellen found herself inhaling deeply, every breath alive with memories. Seeing through the skin of the world, curling up inside a fleeting moment, opening herself up to truth—she’d known how to do these things once, or had been learning to, anyway. How strange to live life as two different people, to shed your old self like a skin and emerge in another form altogether. Had it really been that easy?
“Mom, can we go see the gym?”
“Yes, of course, in a minute.” Mary Ellen stood in front of an abstract pastel sketch pinned to the wall, studying its composition. Bold, widening beams of color slanted through vertical refractions, the whole thing overlaid with sweeps of bright pink. It was impossibly wild and yet so intelligent, so coherent, like a song about light. Like a magic trick. Mary Ellen never really had the magic the way some of the more talented kids in her classes had, but that hadn’t bothered her, somehow. Art was play, it hadn’t had a chance to turn serious, and she supposed that was why she’d left it behind so easily—the way she’d abandoned her Lite-Brites and her sticker collection and her ballerina-topped music box.
“Mom?”
But what if she hadn’t? What if she’d given it a chance to turn serious—or if not serious, at least meaningful? Who would she be today?
“Yes?”
“Can we go?”
Mary Ellen inhaled deeply, one more time, then reached into her purse for a map of the campus. She had no idea where the gym was.
• • •
There were tablecloths at L’Auberge, but they were yellow, not white, and steak au poivre wasn’t on the menu. Fortunately, Mary Ellen’s gin martini was made right, bracingly cold and dry, so she got a second one while the girls fretted over what to order. She did remember the place, could even recall where she’d sat with her father—near the fireplace, under a large, hazy painting of some French-looking cows. It was the kind of place her parents loved: quiet, old-fashioned, reassuringly expensive.
Her parents hadn’t always gone to these sorts of restaurants. They’d both grown up in blue-collar families and worked their way to the top, the hard way (the right way)—her mother a successful rep for a medical device company, her father a partner in his law firm. They’d had Mary Ellen late in life, after being told i
t was hopeless, and even this miraculous event was understood to be a product of their striving: something to be savored, along with so many other accomplishments, over evening cocktails and little dishes of pistachios.
“Cheers,” Mary Ellen said now, raising her nearly empty martini glass. “To your brilliant careers.” Sydney and Shelby obligingly lowered their heads and slurped soda through their straws. “And to Gramps, who first brought me here, back when I was a naive sophomore.” She tipped her drink back, blinking rapidly.
“This place was here back then?”
“Way back then?” Mary Ellen smiled ruefully. “Yes. Your grandfather brought me here to talk about my future. He wanted to make sure I got the most out of my education.” The waiter brought their food, and Mary Ellen looked longingly at Sydney’s risotto. “I should’ve ordered that. I don’t know why I got the fish.”
“And did you?” Shelby asked.
“What?”
“Get the most out of your education?”
“Well, sure,” Mary Ellen said, wondering if her daughters understood that all of this—the college trip, the dinner, their entire way of life—was in some way or another the result of her choices while at UNC. “Once I switched over to marketing, anyway. Which, incidentally, was your grandfather’s idea.” Mary Ellen took a bite of fish but found it hard to swallow. She had a sudden flashback to that meal, to the steak au poivre, which Daddy had ordered for her. She could remember the way her knife had parted the purplish meat like a scalpel, blood slipping around the edges of the thick, gray sauce and pooling under her green beans. She hated rare meat. She always had.
“Just try to remember,” she said, wiping her lips, “that this is your time.” She lowered the napkin to her lap and twisted it between her hands. “Don’t rush it. And don’t be so damn…obedient.” The word caught in her throat.
The Runaways Page 3