A silver Saab pulled in behind my parents’ car and idled there, not honking. “You guys should move,” I said. “Here, let me get in.” I opened the back door, and when I climbed inside, it smelled like car trip, stuffy and sour. An empty Burger King bag rested on the seat, and several soda cans rolled on the floor. I could not suppress a comparison between this and the kind of food Martha’s parents brought on their drives down from Vermont: vegetable soup in thermoses and cracked wheat bread and cut-up fruit that they ate with their real silverware from home. Stowed behind the back seat were my parents’ suitcases, two large, light blue, fake leather squares. When Joseph and I had been younger, we’d made nests out of these suitcases, I remembered suddenly, padding their interiors with blankets, then climbing in and pulling the flaps over us like roofs that we propped up with our heads. The memory filled me with an odd, preemptive exhaustion-everything about my parents, even their luggage, reminded me of something, or made me feel a certain way.
My father accelerated and we rode through the gates of Ault. It had been more than two years since my father had driven me there to start my freshman year. He began to turn left, as he’d done that other time, and I said, “Go right, Dad. There’s a parking lot behind the dining hall.” In fact, there was another parking lot to the left, behind the schoolhouse. But that one got more pedestrian traffic, more students who might catch sight of my parents’ shitty car. My self-consciousness about the Datsun was something I’d anticipated, something I had to live with but could not acknowledge-a bride descending the aisle with an itchy nose.
“Honey, which one is your dorm?” my mother asked.
“You can’t see it from here. It’s through that arch.”
“This is all just beautiful.” She looked back and smiled, and I could tell she intended the remark as a compliment to me, as if I deserved credit for Ault’s appearance.
“Now go right again,” I said.
This early in the day, a lot of parking spaces were still open. My father pulled into one and turned off the ignition. He looked at my mother, then at me. “Should we just stay in the car and see if our asses get permanently attached to the seat?”
Normally, I’d have laughed-in general, my father made me laugh a lot-but instead I hastily said, “Thank you guys for coming. For driving so far.”
“Honey, we wanted to,” my mother said as we all climbed out. “Ignore Dad. Now what I need first is a bathroom and then we want you to show us everything.”
We entered the dining hall through the back, and I led them toward the bathrooms. Just outside the women’s room, I again had that sense of unease about leaving either of them alone, even briefly. It was probably smarter to stay with my father in the hall because he was the one who could get into more trouble-he could provoke it somehow, whereas my mother would only bumble into it-but I had to go to the bathroom myself. And, really, wasn’t I being ridiculous? I followed my mother, and pushed into the stall next to hers. As I was setting toilet paper on the seat, she released a long, sighing fart and began to pee. “Lee, do we get to meet Martha?” she asked from her stall.
“I was thinking I could give you a tour of the campus, and then we can swing by the dorm. And then at noon, there’s the lunch, and my soccer game is at two.”
“Tell me again who you’re playing.”
“Gardiner.”
“Gardener, did you say? Like flower garden?”
“It’s pronounced the same, but it’s spelled differently.”
“Now why is it called that?”
“Mom, I have no idea. It’s just a school in New Hampshire.” She did not respond and, feeling mean, I added, “It was probably someone’s last name.”
She flushed the toilet-conversing with her required so much attention that I had not yet started to pee-and then I went myself. I heard her wash her hands, and then she called, “Honey, I’m going to find Dad.” Maybe she, too, felt concerned about him being on his own.
When I emerged from the bathroom, they were looking at the framed pastel drawings on the wall. “Are any of these by you?” my mother asked. “Did you wash your hands, honey?”
“Of course.”
“Your mother’s afraid you’ll get WASP germs,” my father said.
This was a familiar joke-at home, after we returned from church and my mother told my brothers and me to wash our hands, my father would say, “Your mother’s afraid you’ll get Catholic germs”-but this version of it surprised me; it surprised me that my father knew what a WASP was.
“Oh, stop it, Terry,” my mother said.
I wondered if she knew, too.
“None of the drawings are mine,” I said. “I’m not taking art this semester.” (My parents were not the kind-like Conchita Maxwell’s mother-who knew every class I took, every way I spent my time.)
“You can see where we eat,” I said. “It’s this way.” They followed me into the dining hall proper. The windows there reached almost to the ceiling-nearly fifty feet-and sunlight was streaming through all the panes on the east side of the room. On the south side, two steps led to a dais on which was set an extralong table-this was where the headmaster sat during formal dinners and where seniors sat the rest of the time-and behind the table hung a school crest the size of a rowboat. Covering most of the rest of the wall were white marble panels with the names of all the senior prefects from 1882 on. In the main hall of the schoolhouse were wooden panels with the names of everyone from every class, but these were more special; there were fewer names, and they’d been engraved and then painted gold. All the tables in the room had already been set in preparation for lunch, and the kitchen staff was setting out napkins bunched up to resemble fans. I turned around. “I’ll show you the chapel.”
Neither of my parents moved. “It’s like on our glasses.” My mother was pointing to the wall behind the headmaster’s table.
“Yeah, the school crest.” The first Christmas after I’d started at Ault, I’d given my parents a set of four highball glasses from the school store. My mother put them out for dinner when I was home-because there were five of us, one person always got a different glass-but I doubted they used them when I wasn’t there.
“And what are the other things on the wall?”
“They’re lists of who the”-my mother wouldn’t know what a prefect was-“kind of like class presidents,” I said. “All the people who were class presidents their senior year here.”
“Can we look at them?”
I squinted at her. “You won’t know any of the names.”
“So?” my father said.
He and I eyed each other. “I’m not saying you can’t,” I said. “I just don’t understand why you want to.” My father continued to watch me. “Fine,” I said. I crossed the dining room, and I heard them following me.
But-of course this was true and of course I’d forgotten it-they did recognize some of the names. They recognized three of them: a graduate from the thirties who’d gone on to be a U.S. vice president, one from the fifties who’d become head of the CIA, and, from the late seventies, a movie actor. I had told them before about these alumni, and about other alumni, not necessarily senior prefects, who’d gone on to acclaim; to people outside the school, it was the existence of famous graduates-and not, say, current students’ median SAT scores-that seemed to most validate Ault. At home, if my parents’ friends knew one thing about the place I went to school, it wasn’t where it was or even what it was called; it was the names of the celebrities who’d graduated before me.