by Susan Wiggs
Ah, but the price of succeeding is a piece of your soul. I bite my lip to keep from trying to explain this to Dan. He would tell me I’m being overly dramatic. Maybe so, but everything about this process feels dramatic. This child has been the focus of every day of my life for the past eighteen years. After being a parent for so long, I am forced to surrender the role. Now, all of a sudden, a void has opened up.
Snap out of it, I tell myself. I have so much to be thankful for—this rich, full life. Health, husband and home. And lots to look forward to. It’s wrong to mope and wallow in the tragedy of it all. What’s the matter with me?
The matter is this—I’m facing a huge loss. The biggest part of my daughter’s life is about to start, and it doesn’t include me and Dan. Granted, we’ve had plenty of time to prepare, but now that the moment has arrived, it’s as unexpectedly painful as a sudden accident.
Although greeting card companies have created themes around every possible life event, there’s no ritual for this particular transition.
This is surprising, because when a child leaves for college, it is the end of something. Other than birth or death, leaving home for any reason is the most extreme of life transitions. One moment we’re a family of three. The next, we’ve lost a vital member. It’s a true loss, only people don’t understand your grief. They don’t send you sympathy cards or invite you to join a support group. They don’t flock to comfort you. They don’t come to your door bearing tuna casseroles and bottles of Cold Duck and platters of cookies on their good chintz china.
Instead, the journey to college is a rite of passage we mark as a joyous occasion, one we celebrate by buying luggage and books on how to build a fulfilling life. But really, if you ask any mother, she’ll tell you that deep down, we want to mark it as a loss, a funeral of sorts. We never show our sorrow, though. Our sadness stays in the shadows like something slightly shameful.
Travis leaves, peeling himself away like a Bandaid that’s been stuck on too long. His union job at the plant keeps him on a strict schedule; he cannot linger. Molly stands on the front sidewalk and watches his Camaro growing smaller and smaller down the tree-lined street, flanked by timber frame houses from the 1920s, remnants of the days when this was a company town. Molly’s face is stiff and pale, as if she’s been shocked and disoriented by unexpected pain. Her arms are folded across her middle.
I hurry outside, wanting to comfort her. “I know it’s hard,” I say, giving her a hug.
She is stiff and unyielding, regarding me like an intruder. “You have no idea how this feels,” she says. “You never had to leave Dad.”
She’s right. Dan and I met at a bar twenty-some years ago, and after our first dance together, we already knew we’d be a couple. If somebody had told me I had to leave him and head off to a world of strangers, would I have been willing to do that? Yes, shouts a seldom-heard voice inside me—oh, yes.
Molly waits for an answer.
“Aw, Moll. Your dad and I were in a much different place—”
“Nobody forced you two apart,” she says, her voice rising.
“And nobody’s forcing you and Travis apart.”
“Then why am I leaving? Why am I going thousands of miles away?”
“Because it’s what you’ve always wanted, Molly.”
“Maybe I’ve changed my mind. Maybe I should stay and go to college in state.”
“We need to finish loading the car,” I tell her.
We argue. Loudly, in the driveway. About what won’t fit in the car. About what is necessary, what Molly will not be able to do without. She flounces into the house and returns a few minutes later with a duffel bag and a green-shaded lamp.
“Sweetie, I don’t think you need the lamp,” I point out.
“I want to bring it. I’ve always liked this lamp.”
She crams the duffel bag in the back, using it to cushion the lamp.
It has shone over her desk while she worked diligently at connect-the-dots, a report on Edward Lear, a tear-stained journal, a labored-over college essay, a love letter to Travis Spellman. The lamp has been a silent sentinel through the years. Remembering this, I quickly surrender. I don’t want to argue anymore, especially not today.
Like making the quilt, driving her to college seemed like a good idea at the time. She could have flown, and shipped her things separately, but I couldn’t stand the thought of leaving her at the curb at the airport like a houseguest who’s over-stayed her welcome.
A road trip just seemed so appealing, a final adventure for the two of us to share. A farewell tour. All through the summer I’ve been picturing us in the old Suburban, stuffed to the top with things Molly will need in the freshman dorm, singing along with the radio and reminiscing about old times. Now as I face the sullen rebellion in Molly’s face, the idyllic picture dissipates.
The trip is still a good idea, though. A long drive with no one but each other for company will give us a chance to talk about matters we’ve been avoiding all summer long, possibly her entire adolescence. When she was little, we discussed the great matters of her life at bedtime, lying together in the dark, watching the play of moon shadows on the ceiling. In high school, she stayed up later than I did, and our conversations shrank to sleepy utterances. Nighttime was punctuated by the creak of a floorboard under a furtive foot, the rasp of a toothbrush washing away the smell of a sneaked beer. Some days, we barely spoke a half-dozen words.
I want these long, empty hours with her on the road. I need them with an intensity that I hide from Molly, because I don’t want her to worry that I’m getting desperate. She’s a worrier, my Molly. A pleaser. She wants everyone to be happy, and if she had some inkling of how I’m feeling right now, she’d try to do something about it. I don’t want her to feel as if she’s responsible for my happiness. Good lord, who would wish that on a child?
We finish packing. Everything is in order, every checklist completed, our iPods organized with music and podcasts, every contact duly entered in our mobile phones. Finally, the moment has arrived.
“Well,” says Dan. “I guess that’s it.”
What’s it? I wonder. What? But I smile and say, “Yep. Ready, kiddo?”
“In a minute,” she says, stooping and patting her leg to call the dog.
I am unprepared for the wrench as she says good bye to Hoover. We adopted the sweet-faced Lab mix as a pup when Molly was four. They grew up together—littermates, we used to call them, laughing at their rough-and-tumble antics. Since then, she has shared every important moment with the dog—holidays, neighborhood walks and summer campouts, fights with friends, Saturday morning cartoons, endless tosses of slimy tennis balls.
Through the years, Hoover has endured wearing doll clothes and sunglasses, being pushed in a stroller, taken to school for show-and-tell, and sneaked under the covers on cold winter nights. These days, he has slowed down, and is now as benign and endearing as a well-loved velveteen toy. None of us dares to acknowledge what we all know—that he will be gone by the time Molly finishes college.
She hunkers down in front of him, cradling his muzzle between her hands in the way I’ve seen her do ten thousand times before. She burrows her face into his neck and whispers something. Hoover gives a soft groan of contentment, loving the attention. When she draws away, he tries to reel her back in with a lifted front paw—Shake, boy. Molly rises slowly, grasps the paw for a moment, then gently sets it down.
Next, she turns to Dan. I notice the stiff set of his shoulders and the way he checks and rechecks everything—tires, cell phone batteries, wiper fluid. I can see him checking Molly, too, but she doesn’t recognize the pain in his probing looks. He hides behind a mask of bravado, reassuring to his daughter but transparent to me.
Their goodbye mirrors their history together through the years—loving, a little awkward. He’s never been one to show his emotions, but he was the one who taught her to swim, to laugh, to belch on command, to throw a baseball overhand, to pump up a bicycle tire, to eat smo
ked oysters straight out of the can, to flatten pennies on railroad tracks.
Their farewell is perfunctory, almost casual. They both seem to possess a quiet understanding that their lives are meant to intersect and diverge. “Call me tonight,” he says. “Call me whenever you want.”
“Sure, Dad. Love you.”
They hug. He kisses her on the crown of her head. His hand lingers on her arm; she doesn’t meet his eyes. Sunlight glances off the car window as she gets in.
Dan comes around to the other side and kisses me, his lips warm and familiar. “Take care, Linda,” he says in a husky voice, the same thing he always says to me, but today the words carry extra weight.
“Of course,” I say, holding him for an extra beat. Then I whisper in his ear, “How will I get through this?”
He pulls back, giving me a quizzical look. “Because you will,” he says simply. “You can do anything, Lindy.”
I smile to acknowledge the kind words, but I’m not certain I trust them.
The rearview mirror frames a view of our boxy, painted house, where we’ve lived since before Molly was born. Not for the first time, it hits me that I’ll come home to an empty nest. People say this stage of life is a golden time, filled with possibility. Someone—probably a woman with too many kids and pets—once said the true definition of freedom is when the last child leaves home and the dog dies. At last, you get your life back. Your time is your own. The trouble is—and I can’t bear to admit this, even to Dan—I never said I wanted it back.
As we pull out onto the street, he stands and watches us go, the dog leaning against his leg. My husband braces an arm on the front gate and lowers his head. When I get back from this journey, he and I will be alone again, the way we were eighteen years ago, before the explosion of love that was Molly, before late-night feedings and bouts of the croup, before scary movies and argued-over curfews, before pranks and laughter, tempests and tears.
With Molly gone, we’ll have all this extra space in our lives. I’ll have to look him in the eye and ask, “Are you still the same person I married?” Or maybe the real question is, Am I?
I picture us seated across the dinner table from each other, night after night. What will we talk about? Do we know everything about each other, or is there still more to discover? I can’t recall the last time I asked him about his dreams and desires, or the last time he asked me something more than “Did you feed the dog this morning?”
I invested so much more time in Molly over the years. When there’s a daughter keeping us preoccupied, it’s easy to slip away from each other.
With all my heart, I hope it’s equally easy to reach across the divide. I suppose I’ll find out soon enough.
Chapter Two
I don’t even bother offering to drive. Molly insists on driving everywhere, and has done so ever since she turned sixteen. At the moment this is a convenient arrangement. I can use the time to work on the quilt. I’m picturing the completed piece at the other end of the journey—warm and soft, a tangible reminder of Molly’s past. Each bit of fabric is a puzzle piece of her childhood, tessellating with the others around it. All that remains is to finish quilting the layers together, adding more embellishments along the way.
Working by hand rather than machine is soothing, and the pattern is free-form within the wooden hoop. On the solid pieces of fabric, words and messages can be embedded like secrets in code: Courage. You’re beautiful. Walk it off. Freud was wrong. I should declare the thing finished by now but, like a nesting magpie, I keep adding bright trinkets—a button from a favorite sweater, a blue ribbon from a piano recital, a vintage handkerchief and a paste earring that belonged to her grandmother. There’s some old, faded fabric from Molly’s kindergarten apron, green with little laughing monkey heads. And a bow from her prom corsage, worn with shining pride just a few months ago.
Though it’s impossible to be objective, I know this thing I have created is beautiful, even with all its flaws. Even though it’s not finished. This is a record of her days with me, from the moment I realized I was pregnant—I was working in the garden, wearing a yellow dotted halter top, which is now part of the quilt—to today. Yes, even today I grabbed Hoover’s favorite bandanna to incorporate.
Like so many projects I’ve tackled over the years—like parenting itself—the quilt is ambitious and unwieldy. But maybe the hours of enforced idleness in the car will be just what I need to add the final flourishes.
As we drive along the main street of our town, Molly looks out at the flower baskets on the streetlamp poles, the little coffee stands and cafés, the bank and bike shop and bookstore, the fashion boutiques and galleries advertising fall sales, the congregational church with its painted white spire. There’s the stationery shop, advertising back-to-school specials, and of course, Pins & Needles, my favorite place in town. The charming old building stands shoulder-to-shoulder between a bakery and a boutique, sharing a concrete keystone that marks the year it was built—1902. Arched windows in the upper stories, which house an optometrist and a chiropractor, are decked with wrought-iron window boxes filled with asters and mums. On the street level is the abundant display window, replete with fabrics in the delicious colors of autumn—pumpkin and amber, flame red, magenta, shadowy purple.
A small, almost apologetic-looking sign in the window says, “Business For Sale.” Minerva, the shop owner, is retiring and she’s been looking for a buyer since the previous Christmas. She’s told all her customers that if it’s not sold by the new year, she’ll simply close its doors. This option is looking more and more likely. It’s hard to imagine someone with the kind of passion and energy it takes—not to mention the capital—to run a small shop. Once the store is cleared to the bare walls, it will look like a blight on our town’s main street, a missing tooth in the middle of a smile. On top of Molly going away, it’s another blow.
Across the street is a trendy clothing boutique where Molly has spent many an hour—and many a dollar—agonizing over just the right look. As she was trying on jeans the other day, a debate ensued. Do girls on the East Coast wear skinny jeans or boot cut? Do they even wear hoodies? As if I would know these things. When she began worrying about what to wear, I realized that everything was getting very real for Molly. For a girl who has never lived anywhere else, this is a huge step. Now that we’re on the road, she is facing the reality that college is an actual place, not just a display of glossy pictures in a catalog. I want to tell her not to be afraid, but I suspect the advice wouldn’t be welcome.
Navigating the ungainly Suburban up the ramp to the interstate, Molly fiddles with the radio, but it’s all talk so she switches it off. We’ve got our iPods if we’re desperate for music.
From the grim look on Molly’s face as she cranes her neck to check the rearview mirror, it’s clear that she knows I was right about the lamp taking up too much space. I can’t help thinking what I won’t allow myself to say: I told you so.
Agitated, I put on my discount-store reading glasses—the ones that perch on my nose and make me look like a schoolmarm. Another visible rite of passage. For me, the moment occurred a few years back, when I turned thirty-nine-and-a-half. I was in a gift shop, trying to read a sale tag, and suddenly my arm wasn’t quite long enough to make out the price.
A sales clerk offered me a pair of reading glasses, and the fine print came into focus. The fact that the glasses had cute faux-Burberry frames offered scant comfort. At first, I was a bit embarrassed to put them on around Dan and Molly, but when you love needlework and crossword puzzles as much as I do, you swallow your pride.
I open the canvas quilt bag and the project spills across my lap. The oval hoop frames a section made of a calico maternity blouse I wore while carrying Molly. I stab the needle in, telling myself it’ll be finished soon enough, one stitch after another. The needle flashes in and out like a little silver dart.
“Bad intersection up here,” I say, glancing up when we reach the crossroads leading to the interstate. “Be
sure you signal.”
“Hello. I’ve only been through this intersection a zillion times. And did you know that at eighteen, a person’s vision is performing at its peak?”
I adjust my glasses. “So is her smart mouth.” My needle starts writing the words “be sweet,” adding a curlicue at the end.
“I’m just saying, don’t worry about my driving. I learned from the best.”
This is true. Dan’s an excellent driver, alert and confident, traits he passed along to our daughter. Most of her friends learned through Driver’s Ed, but money was tight that year due to a layoff, and Dan did the honors. I used to wonder what they talked about during all those hours of practice, but when I asked, they both offered blank looks. “We didn’t talk about anything.”
What she means is, Dan has a way of communicating without talk. He can speak volumes with a glance, a chuckle or a shrug. The two of them are comfortable in their silence in the way Molly and I are comfortable nattering away at each other.
Sure enough, there’s a small tangle of traffic at the intersection, but I bite my tongue. Literally, I press my teeth into my tongue. I will not speak up. The time is past for correcting my daughter, giving directives. These final days together should be special, sacred almost, the last slender thread of a bond that has endured for eighteen years and is about to be willfully severed.
Molly expertly accelerates up the on-ramp and merges smoothly with the flow of traffic. She keeps her eyes on the road, her profile delicate and clean-lined, startlingly adult.
It’s a bright September morning, and the lingering heat of late summer shimmers, turning the asphalt into a river of mercury. With a flick of her little finger, Molly signals and moves into the swift current of the middle lane. She is a competent driver, skilled, even. She’s competent and skilled at many things—water polo, trigonometry, getting rid of phone solicitors, being a good friend.
Her spirit, her self-assurance and independence, are the sort of wonderful qualities a mother wants in her daughter. My goal was always to raise a child capable of making judgments on her own. Teaching her has been a joyous process, while actually seeing her go off in her own direction is intensely bittersweet. Adulthood, I suppose, is the final exam to see which lessons she absorbed.