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Campus Visit

We were driving. We were driving, my mother and I, across the green fields of New York State. It was my April school holiday and I had the week off. I’d already been accepted at the one college where I’d applied, a school twenty minutes from home, but my mother surprised me with this trip, and I went along. My mother didn’t usually surprise me; usually we acted more like two toothless dry sisters, as ready to crumble as old crackers left behind in a cupboard. And then my mother would do something like this, surprising me, and even thinking we weren’t so close together wasn’t true. But still, I was ready for a change, so I played along.

*

“You tell them you’re a junior. It’s just a year different, they’ll never know,” my mother explained as we drove through hills and farmland. There was so much space out here. I’d spent my life in the raggedy small mill towns around the state capital hearing jokes about the people who lived upstate, their guns and their livestock and their pickup trucks. We hardly saw any people at all. Instead, we drove seventy—I didn’t know my mother’s car could go that fast—and lost track of miles travelled to high grasses, the occasional field of crops in orderly rows. “And you’ll get the whole college experience. Spend the night, talk to the girls who go there. See what it’s like.”

“But what will you do?” I asked. For the fourth time, I visualized by mom’s office cube, her inbox filling up with papers till new hands cleared them away.

“I’ll get a hotel room,” she said. “I’ll order room service and watch reruns of Law and Order. Don’t worry about me. This is your future.”

“But I’m not a junior,” I said. “I graduate in two months. And you’ve already written the check to Sage.”

“Humor me,” she said. “This place looks cute. Are you hungry?”

“I guess so,” I said, and she turned the car onto the gravel lot of this little clapboard place with a sign out front that said HOT LUNCH. She stopped the car and dug in her purse for change and then handed me the number of the admissions office at Hamilton. “Remember what I told you, she said. “You’re a junior. You’re in the area by surprise. You want to spend the night.”

*

It was a beautiful campus, and however many times the campus tour guide said it, standing beside another shaded brook or stately old building didn’t make it any less so. There was something about the land out here, the nature of it, that was like a treasure that never ran out. I wanted to ask about the horses—when I’d come here for camp when I was twelve, we were all of us wild about the horses. But I could just as well have waited. After relentlessly pointing us at beauty for an hour, it was with a kind of cruel, triumphant delight that we climbed a small hill and found ourselves overlooking the show ring. “And of course, the horses…,” the guide said, but I wasn’t even listening anymore; I watched students, girls just a year older than me lead the horses round the dirt circle, like they knew just what to say to those self-assured animals.

*

Chelsey was a weird choice for a student ambassador. She took me to the dining hall for dinner and just stared at me when I ate, not eating a bite. I think she actually scowled when I called her Shelly. But things got better when she took me back to the sorority house and introduced me to her sisters in the Tri-Delts. There was another girl there from the Capitol region, and even if we didn’t know any of the same people, we knew the same places. And then, Chelsey decided we should all go out for dessert, so we piled into her Focus and we drove to the Bennigan’s along the highway.

I wished I didn’t eat so much at dinner. Now I saw Chelsey was saving her appetite for dessert. We all ordered together and shared, and this was the kind of thing I never had at home—me and my girl friends from high school always had jobs to go to, or else parents, like Allyson had, who didn’t let her go out at all. Chocolate was the great unifier, and we were all laughing and bonding and I had this sinking feeling that when my mom picked me up tomorrow I wouldn’t want to go home, to go back to my real life at all.

We played a game imagining the conversations other diners were having, and tried to crack each other up. There was an elderly couple who were kind of sweet, actually, and who just didn’t seem to get the waitress’ message that it was time to go, and then a group of middle aged men who took up a whole side of the bar, all of them droopy drawered in the unfortunate baseball uniforms of some sort of corporate league. And then someone, I swear it wasn’t Chelsey, zeroed in on this solitary middle aged woman who was sitting by herself and digging into a brownie landslide, and everyone started making these num num num sounds and then these oh oh oh orgasm sounds, and it probably wouldn’t have been funny even if it wasn’t my mom. As it was, I wanted to slide under the table and die right there.

*

The next morning, just like we’d planned, my mother pulled into the paved horseshoe in front of the admissions office. I had a packet of admissions materials I could fill out to be considered for what they called “rolling admission” and my overnight bag. I threw the overnight bag in the back seat but I wasn’t sure what to do with the admissions packet, so I just held it in my lap.

“Did you have fun?” my mother asked when I’d buckled myself in and we were pulling through the gates of the university. I just nodded; I had had fun. I was around people I’d see more of if I had a different kind of life, and even now I didn’t know whether or not I wanted that.

“Were the girls mean? Did they treat you the right way?”

“They were sweet,” I said. “They were different, but I really liked them. And anyway, I can take care of myself.”

One of us sighed.

“Well of course you can, sweetheart. I wouldn’t have brought you here if I didn’t think you could handle it.” That made me want to cry, a little; I didn’t know if I could handle it, could handle driving away from it. I blew my nose into a tissue to cover a sniffle and tried to hold my voice steady.

“What about you? Did you miss me?” I asked, trying to get back to the fun conversations we had on the drive here. It would be a long drive if I sat here moping the whole way.

“Of course I did,” she said. “I took myself out and treated myself the way a woman should be treated.”

“That sounds a little weird,” I said, and wrinkled my nose at her, watched myself doing it in the rear view mirror.

“Well, I don’t care. When you’re older, you’ll see. What you do for yourself makes you feel more loved than what anyone else can do.”

“That sounds like excuses to me,” I said. “That’s the kind of thing someone says when she doesn’t have anyone in her life and nothing to show for why.” I looked up at the rearview mirror, wanting to see my mom’s reaction, but when she flicked her gaze there, I looked away.

“You certainly seem to know just what this morning.” She didn’t sound angry about it; if anything, it was like maybe she was making fun of me. “Maybe we don’t need for you to go to college after all.”

“I didn’t mean it,” I said. “I just think, there’s got to be a way to do what you want without feeling like you’re missing out on something.”

“Well, when you find out, drop me a line,” my mother said, and smiled at me in the rear view. She drove the country road that led from town back to the interstate. And I tossed the folder of admissions materials into the back of the car, where it promptly slid off the seat and onto the floor. Papers slid everywhere.