The Mighty Queens of Freeville

by Amy Dickinson

  Emily showed up on time for the precollege tests she needed to take. She sought out her college counselor for solo sessions. We visited several campuses together—our tours became a blur of backward-walking student guides talking about the wonders of the meal plan and their awesome classes, attractive and accessible professors, and totally fun roommates. Our most memorable visit was a trip we took to Williamsburg, Virginia, to see the College of William and Mary. Emily and I had been to Colonial Williamsburg before—on a tourist trip when she was nine years old. On that trip we indulged our geeky love of old-timey costumes and strolled up and down the Duke of Gloucester Street wearing bonnets and eating salty/sweet kettle corn, a treat I would place at the tippy top of my personal food pyramid. Nine years later, the college visit happened on an exquisite day; Emily went on a campus tour while I lay on the grass of the college’s great lawn, pondering her departure and the mysteries of my life beyond.

  Emily raced home to the mailbox during her lunch period every day for two weeks in March of her senior year. She received her share of fat and skinny envelopes and in the end chose to go to William and Mary. The kettle corn in colonial Williamsburg might have been the deciding factor, though the prospect of bonnet wearing while taking a work-study job as a butter churner was a definite inducement.

  Our good-bye was long, sustained—and involved lots of plastic bins. I can’t think of what we all did before we had the ability to hermetically seal our belongings in plastic, but I seem to remember it involved old suitcases and those big black trunks with the flimsy locks that also doubled as dorm room coffee tables. Now it was all Tupperware.

  Emily and I packed her room in Chicago along with other assorted furniture and our gigantic green balloon-tire bikes, shoved Chester the cat into his carrier, and drove East to Freeville for our summer of good-byes. I thought of my father as I climbed up into the large beat-up moving van I had rented for the trip and navigated it through downtown Chicago. My old man’s legacy to me was not only my congenital jackassiness, but also the natural-born ability to drive a truck.

  In Freeville we mark the passage of summer by watching the corn grow. When Emily and I left for a long-promised week in Paris in late June, the corn was shin high in the fields surrounding the village. In Paris, Emily tried out her high school French while I talked. Loudly. And. Slowly. In. English. Eventually I learned to ask simple questions in French while not understanding one word of the answers. Emily was able to get her hands on an English version of the newest and last Harry Potter book and read it obsessively while we lingered, dreamily, at cafés. Then in the afternoons she read aloud to me while I rested and attempted to recover from my jet lag (I never did). The first Harry Potter book came out when Emily was eight, and I had read the adventure aloud to her. Now her childhood was bookended by her favorite characters, who seemed to grow and change at exactly the same rate she did. Now, she was reading to me.

  In Freeville, we rode bikes, kayaked on the creek, and went “porch visiting”—setting out from our house on Main Street and spending the day roaming from porch to porch—from grandmother to cousins to sisters to aunts—admiring gardens and drinking iced tea. Every other Saturday morning, the men’s bar b que committee at the Methodist Church fired up their long trough of coals in the bar b que pit across from the church and set the marinated birds breast to wing on the long grill. When the meat started to cook, its vinegary scent drifted through the village, and we knew what we’d be eating for dinner.

  The corn grew into great tall stalks and the fields looked densely packed, rippling and lush. It ripened early, and so starting the first week of August, we ate it every night—and then, abandoning any pretext of nutritional balance, went to an all-corn diet while it lasted. We compared varieties—was the Baby Sweet really as sweet as the Butter N Sugar? We were partial to the bicolored varieties with small, pale kernels. It tasted more like candy than a vegetable. I’d cook up a dozen ears at night and put the leftovers on a plate in the refrigerator, snack on it late at night, and eat a cold cob for breakfast along with my coffee.

  One or two nights a week if the weather was fine, I pulled out our projector and Emily would set it up in the backyard. We arranged two rows of chairs in the grass—Adirondack chairs, twig chairs, dining room chairs, and two easy chairs from the living room—invited the family over, and played our favorite movies projected against the back of our white house. I let Emily program our summertime film festival, and she chose The Philadelphia Story, Desk Set, Some Like It Hot, and other black-and-white favorites. The tinny vintage soundtracks drifted over our little backyard and mingled with the sounds of traffic on Main Street. Mornings after a movie night while starting out for my early workday, I would look out the kitchen window to see cast-off lap blankets and gnawed-over corncobs lying in the dew. Popcorn littered the grass like snowflakes.

  Wednesday mornings—every Wednesday morning—we met our family at the Queen Diner in Dryden. After Toads diner closed the summer before, we experienced exactly six days of mourning and then switched our weekly family breakfast meetings to the Queen, three miles away. Aunts Lena, Millie, and Jean, cousins Nancy and Lorraine, Rachel, Emily, Mom, and I crowded around a too-small table and took up our long-running family conversation—which was always already in progress.

  At the Queen, we each ordered our regular breakfasts, and Judy, our waitress, patiently wrote out separate checks for our meals and left the checks in a pile on the table. My family is incapable of performing the subtraction required to split a check; they are also unwilling to let one person pick up the check, so every Wednesday Judy writes out ten checks in amounts ranging from $1.56 to $3.48, including tax. My mother and aunts always leave their tips in embarrassing little piles of coins beside each plate, and I follow suit when I’m with them because I don’t want to be too show-offy.

  Emily and I were excited about driving down to Virginia to drop her off at college. She was going over her list of college supplies at the table. We had brought a road atlas with us to review the route with Mom and the aunties. As usual, the conversation circled and wheeled around and never touched down for long.

  My Aunt Lena turned to me. “So, what day will you be back from your trip?” she asked. I could tell this wasn’t an idle question. First of all Aunt Lena had never been one to ask an idle question. Compared to the opinionated big-mouths of the rest of the women of the family, Aunt Lena, the eldest of the group, had a tendency to listen and chuckle. I had an extraordinary affection for her, not only because of her skills as an audience member, but also because her natural reserve often made me wonder what she was thinking.

  Because of a perfect storm of scheduling conflicts among the middle generation of my family, I knew that for the next couple of weeks I would be the only family member in Freeville over the age of twelve and under seventy-five with a valid driver’s license. At the Queen, over the jumble of coffee cups and egg-smeared plates, Aunt Lena looked at me expectantly. I had the distinct impression that she saw a giant steering wheel where my head should be. She didn’t even really have to ask. I knew that the day after dropping Emily off at college, I would be driving Aunt Lena and her husband of sixty-nine and three-quarters years, my Uncle Harvey, to the VA Hospital in Syracuse. After a long lifetime of good health, Harvey had developed heart problems, followed by surgery, followed by that ominous medical catchall known as “complications.”

  My mother and her oldest sister were slowing down. The circumference of their world had shrunk to a roughly fifteen-mile circuit along familiar roads. Syracuse, an hour away along an interstate, was too much and too far to travel. Where I had once scheduled my time according to work commitments and travels with Emily, now I started keeping track of who among the older generation of my family needed to go somewhere. I told Lena I’d make sure to be back from Virginia in time to make the next appointment.

  Emily chose to say good-bye by riding her bike slowly around the village, waving languidly at the school, post office, and swing
sets on the playground. Then before driving out of town in the morning, we pulled into Mom’s driveway, and she came out and stood on her porch, leaning on her cane. “So long, my dear,” she said. (My mother never says good-bye. She only says “so long.”)

  “So long, Mom, I’ll write to you,” Emily said, and I knew she would.

  I had reserved the long drive to Virginia for the conveyance of a thoughtful lecture series I intended to deliver to my daughter with talks on topics such as “Your Body and You,” “The Hidden Menace of Credit Card Debt,” “Roommates: The Good, the Bad and the Bipolar,” and “The Temptation of On-Campus ROTC Recruiters.” Emily, sensing what she was in for, deflected me with Top 40 tunes and frequent Dunkin’ Donuts stops. Two hours from campus, feeling that our time was running out, I said to her, “There’s so much I want to tell you. I feel like I need to tell you important things about life.”

  “Mommy, I’m not—I’m not going out to sea. I’m just going to college. I’ll call you with important questions about life and then you can answer them, how’s that?”

  The southern scenery blurred by. I could see the massive trees thickly lining the interstate drooping and wilting in the heat.

  “Hey,” Emily offered. “Can you list your five favorite books?”

  “Ooooh. Good question. Well played, honey.”

  Emily knew that the whole Edith Wharton/Virginia Woolf relative-ranking issue would soak up much of our remaining time together.

  The August day was airless and southern-sweaty hot. Our hair stuck itself flat against our foreheads in moist clumps. I took Emily to her brick dorm and parked the car while she introduced herself to her two roommates. One, from China, didn’t have any parents with her to distract her; she sat quietly on her bed and told us she had video Web—chatted with her mother in Beijing that morning. The other roommate had two parents in the small room, and they were expressing their anxiety by talking very loudly and quickly about buying more fans (there was no air-conditioning) and rearranging the furniture. Emily and I unloaded her things, and I left her in the room and went to walk around campus, where I saw hundreds of families doing the exact same dance—unloading vans of Tupperware and trying to keep their feelings as tightly sealed as their possessions.

  When I got back to her dorm, Emily’s father had arrived from New York and was trying to stand out of the way in the small and crowded room. We said a fond hello, as we always did, and I was reminded of how we had met, almost thirty years before—in a similar setting on a campus during my own first days of college. He offered to run out to a hardware store to get duct tape or shelving or a throw pillow, and Emily let him.

  Later that afternoon the three of us escaped the stifling room and walked to a bookstore in the village. He and I sat and had iced coffee while Emily shopped for some last-minute school supplies. My ex and I first met over books, we fell in love over (and on top of) books, and I was enchanted when we were students that he kept a very neat list in a ledger of every book he had ever read. We still found it easy to talk about work and what we were watching on television and what we were reading and writing. He congratulated me on my professional success, and I thanked him. I asked about his wife and kids, and he told me. We traded stories about our parents’ illnesses and said we were mutually sorry that they were suffering.

  Over the years, my ex-husband and I had maintained our easy rapport. Here’s how we did our divorce: nicely. While he was talking I wondered if this was one of the last encounters the two of us would ever have. I could imagine seeing him at a graduation ceremony, perhaps a funeral, and maybe, someday, a wedding, but the string connecting us had slackened, and I hadn’t felt its tug in a very long time. In the early days of our breakup, I used to force myself not to call him. Like an addict subscribing to a 12-step program, at the end of each long day I would lie in bed and congratulate myself for not dialing his number that day and promise myself not to dial his number the next day. Now I considered erasing him from my cell phone’s address book because with our child away from home and without the need to coordinate visits, I couldn’t imagine why I would ever call him. Emily had entered his four phone numbers in my phone under the heading dad.

  “Well, this is it,” he said.

  “Yes, I guess it is,” I said.

  “She’s great,” he said, gesturing toward Emily.

  “I’m excited for her,” I said.

  “You’ve done a good job, Amy,” he offered.

  “Well, she was easy to raise,” I said.

  Me? Not so much. Raising me hasn’t exactly been a picnic.

  Emily’s college had thoughtfully planned separate activities for the parents and the students—no doubt this was to start the process of prying apart the embrace. Emily went off to bond with her roommates, my ex-husband went to his hotel, and I participated in a humiliating scavenger hunt that may or may not have also been a cocktail party. I was reminded of how activities and drinking are combined at college in ways you don’t see out in the world.

  The next morning I met Emily for breakfast in the school’s cafeteria, and she told me she really liked her roommates and couldn’t wait to get started. She had a full day of orientation activities ahead of her. I was going to shove off.

  We walked quietly arm in arm to my car. She looked down at me from her full height and said, “Mommy, you’re going to be fine.”

  I looked up at her. My little girl was now a head taller than I. “I know I’ll be fine, my dear, and you are going to be fine too.”

  I decided that until that fine day when we would both be fine, I would firmly seal my feelings in Tupperware.

  Emily opened the car door and placed me in the front seat in the manner you see the cops doing to perps on TV—with a protective hand atop my head so I wouldn’t graze it on the doorframe.

  And then she reached in through the car’s open window, hugged me around the neck, and said, “It’s called Match.com, Mom. You just type in your zip code and a list of guys pops up.”

  “Right, right, I love you too, kid,” I said, and drove away. She waved to me until she was a dot in the rearview mirror, and I stared at her until she disappeared like an apparition into the shimmering landscape of her new home.

  I took back roads up through Virginia and back to DC. That night I stayed at Gay’s house in Washington, and she looked at me tenderly and poured me a glass of wine. Gay had recently taken up African drumming, and even though I would rather stick needles in my eyes than learn a new instrument, when she pulled her two djembe drums out from the corner and taught me some simple rhythms, I felt I was communicating with my dear friend in a new, wonderful, and wordless way. Gay was Emily’s first teacher in nursery school and had watched her grow. Her two children, now both in college, were as dear to me as any of my many nieces and nephews. Gay and I had a pact that we would live together as spinster ladies when we got old—though we both openly hoped it wouldn’t come to that.

  I waited for a wave of something—anything—to prove how much I was missing and mourning Emily, but it wouldn’t come. While I wasn’t looking, my girl reached out and grabbed her adulthood. We had shared her childhood, and her job now was to leave home, and my job was to let her. I couldn’t imagine returning to my empty house except to assume that I would drown my loneliness in merlot, family, and television sitcoms. As I drove due north toward Freeville I concentrated on holding the tears at bay while I tried to redirect my attention to the other women in my life.

  Because now it was their turn.

  TWELVE

  I’ll Fly Away

  MY UNCLE HARVEY has the sleep schedule of a honeybee. He goes to bed at seven o’clock and gets up at 2 A.M., fully rested and ready to pollinate after seven hours of deep sleep. Harvey’s most potent and wide-awake hours are in the deepest shank of the night. While the rest of the world enjoys the fruits of the REM cycle—romping in their dream life with puppies or Pierce Brosnan—Uncle Harvey will drink a pot of coffee, read his Bible, and watch Fox News u
ntil sunup. He starts fading at around noon, so he wisely always tries to grab the first medical appointment of the day.

  The morning after I returned from taking Emily to college in Virginia, I went downstairs at 6 A.M. to discover Aunt Lena and Uncle Harvey waiting patiently in the driveway for me to drive them to the VA hospital in Syracuse. I wondered if they had slept in their car.

  As we drove toward Syracuse, I chitchatted with my aunt and uncle about the lovely rolling farmland bordering the Mohawk Valley. I told them about my trip to drop off Emily at college and said she had already called and was settling in. We watched the sun rise together.

  At the hospital, Harvey went in for his appointment and Lena and I settled into our chairs in the waiting room. I set up my laptop and tried to work; Lena leafed through a magazine and eventually fell asleep, holding her purse on her lap.

  Aunt Lena seemed tired. Lately, all the older women in my life seemed sort of tired. I worried about them. They worked and raised families. They deserved to put their feet up—my mother, especially, because she did it alone.

  Unfortunately, the rheumatoid arthritis she suffered from for the last twenty years has disabled her in heartbreaking degrees. Now, my sisters and I struggle to find ways to make her life easier. I do her shopping and some nights cook dinner for her, and we watch CNN together. We visit, talk about books, go to the movies, and take drives through the countryside. I try to do for her some of the same things she’s done for me, and I didn’t even realize I had become good at it until we were at dinner recently and I leaned over and cut her meat for her, the way you do when your kids are little and you don’t even think about it.

  I knew my priorities had really changed the day I skipped a conference call with my lawyer to take my mother’s cat to the vet to be shaved. You might wonder why a cat needs to be shaved, or who could possibly make enough money to shave cats for a living? I too had all of these questions. (The answers are: (1) mats and burrs, and (2) no one makes enough money to shave cats for a living, but they do it anyway.)