I thought about our marriage, wondering exactly when our priorities had shifted away from our relationship and toward other things. I thought about all our small, seemingly insignificant daily choices and their cumulative effect. How they may have impacted Finch, even subconsciously. He certainly didn’t see his parents talking much these days, and when we did, it was often about money or other superficial things. Even Kirk’s compliments to me were nearly always about my looks or purchases, not my ideas or good works or dreams (though I wasn’t even sure what those were anymore). Had it always been that way with Kirk and me? Or was I just noticing it now that Finch was older and consuming so much less of my time?
I felt a deep, aching loneliness, coupled with a painful longing for a simpler time. I missed all the chores that once felt so tedious—driving my son to school and to all his other activities, cooking breakfast and dinner for him, nagging him to go to bed, and even my least favorite, helping him with his homework at the kitchen table.
All of that segued into thoughts of Tom and Lyla. Their single-father/daughter relationship. Tom’s reaction to Kirk, then me. Lyla’s feelings about everything that had happened to her. I wanted to talk to her—so intensely that it didn’t quite make sense. Only it did—as if there was no way not to make a connection between the present and the past, her story and mine, ancient and buried though the memories were.
* * *
—
IT HAPPENED IN the fall of my first semester at Vanderbilt, while I was still finding my footing and adjusting to a much bigger, fancier pond. I had been more than ready to graduate from high school and escape the mundane day-to-day of Bristol, but I was still a little homesick. More than missing my parents or home, my heart ached for Teddy, my boyfriend of nearly two years who was three hours away in Birmingham, going to Samford University on a basketball scholarship. Teddy and I talked on the phone every night, and wrote long letters by hand, always pledging our love and undying commitment to each other. There was no doubt in my mind that he was the “one.”
In the meantime, though, I forged a fledgling friend group, consisting of my roommate, Eliza, and another two girls on our hall—Blake and Ashley. Although the four of us were different in many ways, including geography (Eliza was from New York, Blake from L.A., and Ashley from Atlanta), the three of them all shared a certain wealthy worldliness, something I distinctly lacked. They’d all graduated from fancy private academies while I’d gone to a run-of-the-mill public high school. They’d traveled the world and visited many of the same spots, like Aspen and Nantucket and Paris. They’d even been to more exotic places, like Africa and Asia, while my family’s idea of a special trip was the Grand Canyon or Disney World. They were all foodies (before that really became a thing) and they constantly bitched about the cafeteria food (which I actually thought was pretty good). They lived for the emerging restaurant scene in Nashville and didn’t think twice about dropping their dads’ credit cards to pay for entrées in the double digits, which I could never afford. I avoided those outings—or declared myself “not very hungry” before finding something from the appetizer portion of the menu. Their wardrobes were insanely good (though Eliza and Blake went for edgier pieces than Ashley’s Laura Ashley look)—while my clothes were extremely basic; the Gap was my version of style. Although they weren’t trying to be snobs, they just sort of naturally were that way, and I found myself struggling to keep up with their sophisticated frame of reference, vacillating between feeling clueless and feeling embarrassed.
Frankly, Teddy didn’t help matters. One weekend he borrowed his buddy’s truck and drove to Nashville, showing up out of the blue to surprise me with a bouquet of wildflowers he’d picked himself on the way. I was thrilled to see him, of course, and touched by the romantic gesture, but as the girls came around to meet him, I found myself feeling inexplicably embarrassed. In Bristol, Teddy was a big deal—not only extremely handsome but also a star athlete. As I looked at him through their eyes, he seemed a little too sweet, too simple, and very country. Even his thick drawl, which I’d always thought was so cute (he was actually born in Mississippi and had grown up there until age twelve), now seemed to border on redneck, along with his many backwoods expressions (things weren’t broken, they were “tore slap up”; they weren’t catty-cornered, they were “cattywonked”; and he was never “about to” do something, he was “fixin’ to”). His hair and clothes and shoes all seemed a bit off, too—nothing I could put my finger on exactly but somehow noticeably different from the boys at Vanderbilt, at least the ones my friends gravitated toward. Of course, it wasn’t enough to shake my confidence in our love—I wasn’t that shallow. But it did make me think a little about what my life would be like with him, versus with someone else.
Aside from anything having to do with Teddy himself, I also had the feeling my friends thought it was sort of lame of me to have come to school with such a serious boyfriend. One night, for example, the three of them were flipping through my yearbook (I never should have brought that sucker to college—they had all left theirs at home) and saw that Teddy and I had been named “most likely to get married.” It amused them to no end, which I couldn’t quite understand.
“Omigod! Hysterical!” Blake said, cracking up and exchanging a telling look with Ashley. It wasn’t the first time I had the feeling that they’d discussed me behind my back.
I grabbed my yearbook from them and snapped it shut.
“It doesn’t mean we will get married,” I said, feeling slightly guilty toward Teddy. “Just that we’d been together the longest or whatever.”
“Hmm,” Blake said.
Eliza asked, “Did I hear you guys fighting last night?”
“We weren’t really fighting,” I said, trying to remember the precise topics from our marathon phone conversation. We always started and ended well, but occasionally there was some petty insecurity and jealousy sprinkled in.
“Long distance never works,” announced Blake, the self-proclaimed authority on dating of any kind.
“Don’t say that,” said Eliza, often somewhat protective of me, perhaps because I’d confided more in her. “It might.”
“Are you at least going to see other people?” Ashley pressed.
“Or just cheat on him?” Blake said, laughing.
“No, and no,” I said, aware of how na?ve I sounded to them but not caring.
“But don’t you want to experience sex with someone other than Teddy?” Blake asked as she lit a cigarette. “He might suck, for all you know. You need a basis for comparison.”
I swallowed and forced myself to make the confession I’d been avoiding. “Umm. I actually haven’t slept with Teddy yet,” I said.
Eliza looked surprised, and the other two laughed and said some variation of “you gotta be kidding.”
“No,” I said. “But we’ve done everything else.”
This addendum didn’t impress them.
“What? Why?” Ashley asked, as if I were the subject of a fascinating sociological study.
“I don’t know….I just wanted…to wait,” I said, thinking of Julie and the vow we’d made during our freshman year in high school to wait as long as we could, and at least until college. I suddenly felt an intense pang of longing for the person I never had to explain these sorts of things to.
“Wait for what? Marriage?” Blake said. “Is it a religious thing?”
“No,” I quickly said, feeling increasingly uncomfortable. Although Teddy believed sex outside marriage was wrong, he was willing to sin if I was.
“Oh. I thought Samford was a big Bible school?” Blake said, her tone slightly critical, though I wasn’t sure whether she was judging the Bible—or Samford as an academic institution.
“Yeah, it’s a Christian school,” I said. “But he’s not a saint or anything.”
“Well, I think it’s great to wait,” Ashley said. Of all the girls’, our values felt the closest, perhaps because we were both from the South.
Eliza and Blake nodded, but I could tell they weren’t buying it—and that they put sex in the same category as sushi. By eighteen, you should have tried both—and California rolls and hand jobs didn’t cut it.
For the first time, it occurred to me that they might be right and that I was playing it too safe. After all, I was in college now. I needed to be a little bolder, broaden my horizons, start thinking for myself instead of relying so much on Teddy.