This anxiety meant that I spent a lot of time hiding, usually in my room, after any pleasant exchange with another person. And there were rules to the anxiety, practically mathematical in their consistency: The less well you knew the person, the greater the pressure the second time around to be special or charming, if that’s what you thought you’d been the first time; mostly it was about reinforcement. Also: The shorter the time that elapsed from your first encounter to your second, the greater the pressure; hence the lecture-to-library agony. And finally: The better the original interaction, the greater the pressure. Often, my anxiety would set in prior to the end of the interaction-I’d just want it to be over while we all still liked each other, before things turned.
As I left the table, Rufina called, “You have fun with your parents.”
My parents-I had forgotten about them. I walked toward the kitchen to put away my plate and silverware, and I felt a knotting in my stomach. Since they’d decided to come, I’d imagined their visit often, the things on campus I’d want to show them, but now that they were almost here, their impending presence seemed an interruption, an inconvenience even. Not that I didn’t enjoy spending time with my parents, but wasn’t I finally becoming comfortable at Ault, weren’t dinners like this evidence of my increasing sense that I belonged? I had entered the dining hall alone, and then, even though Nick had been there, I’d participated in the conversation, eaten spaghetti-my entire first year at Ault, I hadn’t dared eat noodles in public-and weren’t those signs of progress? It struck me suddenly that my parents might be bewildered by me, the Ault version of me for whom it was a daring act to eat spaghetti. In sixth grade, in South Bend, I’d won first place in a pie-eating contest at my elementary school carnival. I’d scarfed down the pie using no hands, collected a gold plastic trophy shaped like a vase with handles, thrown up in a trash can, and proceeded directly to the U-Turn, a ride on which my friend Kelli Robard and I sat in a caged compartment that spun and flipped. But I had changed since then. I was different. And no matter what my parents might think, this-my Ault self-was now my real self.
Outside, it was dark and cool. The stars were bright white, and the almost-full moon was gleaming. The next two days were supposed to be perfect late-October weather, sunny but not hot, and all over campus, the leaves had turned gold and red. For the last two years, the weather had been similarly ideal for parents’ weekend, which was unsurprising; Ault often seemed to me like a person who always got what he wanted.
And I didn’t resent this institutional good fortune-on the contrary, I felt grateful to be a citizen of it. Though I personally did not always get what I wanted, I still was part of Ault’s universe of privilege; I spoke its language now, I knew its secret handshake. My sense of belonging had perhaps never been as acute as on this evening, and I don’t know if I recognized it then-later, it was obvious-but surely the timing was no coincidence. It was because my parents were coming and because I knew they would not belong. I think it often comes down to nothing but contrast-the way that it’s only when you’re sick that you wonder why, during the months and months of being up and about, you never appreciated your health.
First I was sitting outside the schoolhouse, on the limestone steps leading to the entrance on the building’s north side, because my parents would be driving in the gate fifty yards away. They’d said they would arrive around nine. At six that morning, while I’d still been in bed, the pay phone in the common room had rung and I’d bolted down the steps to answer it, knowing no one else’s parents would call so early. They were just past Pittsfield, New York, my mother said, my father was getting coffee, and they couldn’t wait to see me.
I was wearing a tan cotton knee-length pleated skirt, through which I could feel the coldness of the steps, and a navy wool sweater and bluchers with no tights, and I was reading my physics textbook, or at least holding it on my lap. Saturday classes had been canceled and virtually no one was up. It was a cool, sunny morning, and the mist was burning off the huge grass circle and, beyond the buildings, off the athletic fields. I thought of the things I could spend the day doing if my parents weren’t coming-going running, or making a picnic. (Of course, these ideas were disingenuous. I didn’t much like running, and I’d never make a picnic-what would I do, dash into town and buy a baguette?)
I tried to think what my parents wanted from the weekend. I was planning to give them a tour of the campus, and I knew my mother would like to meet Martha. My father was trickier. It seemed so much easier to enter his world-to hang out at his store, to help him rake the yard in the evening, to bring him a beer from the refrigerator while he watched the game (for years, my brother Joseph and I had fought over who got to open the bottle)-than to expect him to enter mine. When I was at school, we weren’t in close contact by either phone or mail. He’d written me just once during my time at Ault, three times if you counted the Easter cards that they all signed, while my mother wrote me letters every two weeks or so. Her letters were both newsy and dull-Ran into Mrs. Nielsen and Bree at the mall last weekend, they asked all about you. Bree said she has a teacher named Pertoski (sp?) for math and he’s real tough, I said I didn’t think you ever had him–and usually after finding an envelope from her in my mailbox, I did not open it immediately; sometimes I even unearthed one in my backpack that I’d been carrying around for three or four days. But when I did open them, I read every word and I kept them all; it seemed mean, it made me feel sad, to put a piece of paper with my mother’s handwriting on it in the trash.
As for my own letters to my parents, and many of the comments I made over the phone-they were lies. After all, Ault had been my idea. I’d filled out the applications on my mother’s old typewriter, and the only parts my parents had helped with were the financial aid forms. Then, when I not only got into several schools but got offered scholarships as well, the biggest scholarship from Ault, I had no choice but to go. Why would I have gone to the trouble of applying if I hadn’t wanted to go? But it was clear my parents always saw boarding school more as an “opportunity” than as a definitively good plan. And thus I could never express my unhappiness to them-not early on, when it was most intense, or later, in its more watered-down daily form. Even believing I liked Ault, my father would say from time to time, “Why don’t you come back home and go to Marvin Thompson?” Or, after I told him about the nickname, “Aren’t you sick of those Massholes yet?” And maybe I wasn’t that unhappy anyway, if I was so set on staying.
At ten of nine, it occurred to me that my parents might miss this gate and go to the other one, and then they’d be wandering around campus looking for me. In my head, they were like Hansel and Gretel heading into the forest, and it seemed necessary that I act as their guardian. I jogged down the steps and hurried around the driveway toward the other gate. This time, I stood just outside it, where surely I wouldn’t miss them. Unless, of course, they’d driven by already, gotten confused, and were at this very moment knocking on the door to a boys’ dorm.
For several minutes, I leaned against a brick column with a concrete ball at the top. My mind had skittered off to something other than their arrival when I heard a honk. They were twenty feet away, ten feet, then right beside me in their-our-dusty Datsun. My mother rolled down the passenger’s-side window, and from the driver’s side my father called, “Heigh-ho, heigh-ho,” and my mother smiled gigantically and stuck her head and arms out and I stepped forward and stooped, and as we embraced I felt a flicker of awkwardness, our faces crushed together, my cheek shoving her big plastic glasses, before I remembered that it was my family and all the usual rules of awkwardness did not apply. “Lee, you look wonderful,” my mother said, and my father grinned and said, “She doesn’t look that good to me,” and my mother said, “Oh, Terry.”