Valentine’s Day felt like just another Saturday in winter, which was bad enough in itself. Eve kept herself reasonably busy during the daylight hours—food shopping, laundry (there was so much more to do now that Brendan was home, especially since he’d gotten into CrossFit), bill-paying, a solo afternoon walk around the half-frozen lake. When she got home, she roasted a chicken with fingerling potatoes and brussels sprouts, a delicious, lovingly prepared meal that she ended up eating by herself, because her son had plans he’d forgotten to mention.
“Sorry,” he said. “Thought I told you.”
“Nope.”
“My bad.”
Yeah, she thought. Your bad.
“Who are you going out with?”
“Chris Mancuso,” he said. “I don’t think you know him.”
“Why can’t you eat here and then go out?”
“We’re gonna get pizza and watch the hockey game. Is that a problem?”
“Fine. Do what you want.”
“Jeez, what’s the big deal?” he asked. “When I was away at school, you ate by yourself every night.”
It was true, of course. She’d happily eaten alone in the fall, because that was how it was supposed to be. His absence was part of the necessary and proper order of things. His presence now was the problem—a huge backward step for both of them—along with his uncanny ability to take up more than his share of space in the house while giving so little in return.
“You’re right.” She waved him toward the door. “Go have your fun. Don’t drink and drive.”
“I know, I know,” he said in a weary voice, as if he were a mature adult who could be counted on to make good decisions. “Enjoy your chicken.”
*
She lingered at the table for as long as possible—she owed herself that much—and then dragged her feet on the cleanup, doing her best to stave off that troubling moment when there was nothing left to do, the official beginning of what she already knew would be a melancholy and restless night.
It had been like this all winter long. She found it difficult to relax after dark—couldn’t curl up with a book, or settle down long enough to watch a movie from beginning to end. She was full of nervous energy, a nagging, jittery feeling that there was somewhere she needed to go, something else—something urgent and important—that she needed to do. But that was the catch: there was nowhere to go, and nothing to do.
All the freedom she’d experienced in the fall, that giddy sense of new horizons, all that was gone. She wasn’t a student anymore, puzzling over feminist theory, drinking and dancing with her friends, exploring her sexuality, making stupid but sometimes exhilarating mistakes. She was just plain old Mom, chopping onions, feeling neglected, cleaning lint from the filter. Her life felt shrunken and constricted, as if the world had shoved her back into an all-too-familiar box that was no longer large enough to contain her. Except that the world hadn’t done any shoving. She’d volunteered for her confinement, climbing in and pulling the cardboard flaps down over her head.
She told herself that she’d done it for Brendan’s sake. After all, he was the college student in the family, not her, despite the fact that she’d completed her first semester with flying colors, earning a solid A in Margo’s class, and high praise for her final paper, which explored the fraught relationship between radical feminism(s) and the transgender movement.
This is excellent!!! Margo had scrawled on the back of the essay, in sloppy, barely legible cursive that Eve couldn’t help but think of as manly, even though she knew it was a faulty mental reflex, a kind of residual transphobia. But Brendan came first: he was the one who really needed to be taking college classes during the spring semester, and ECC was the logical place for him to do it. Eve understood that it was a tricky moment in his academic career—his confidence at an all-time low—and it had felt right to give him some space, to spare him the embarrassment of attending the same college as his mother, of possibly bumping into her at the library—if he ever actually went to the library—or having to compare his grades to hers.
It had seemed like a minor sacrifice at the time—a brief hiatus from her continuing education—but it turned out to be a much bigger loss than she’d anticipated. Without a class to get her out of the house—to focus her thinking and provide her with a community of like-minded people—her intellectual life ran out of steam and her social life went into a coma. She felt like a teenager, grounded indefinitely for one stupid mistake, though she was also the parent who had imposed the punishment, which meant that, as usual, she had no one to blame but herself.
*
Chris wanted the last wing in the basket. I told him to go for it.
“These are pretty good,” he said.
I agreed, and had a big pile of bones on my plate to prove it. But I felt kinda guilty, too, because my mom had cooked a whole chicken at home, and here I was eating hot wings at the Haddington House of Pizza.
“There was this place at my school, Pennyfeathers? Their wings were fucking awesome. Dude, they’d deliver until like two in the morning on weekends.” He got this faraway look in his eyes and nodded for a long time. “I miss those wings.”
Chris missed a lot of things about college. His frat brothers, his rugby teammates, this amazing ice cream place that had waffle cones dipped in chocolate, all the bars on 12th Street that didn’t care if you had a fake ID, and now these wings from Pennyfeathers.
“Those were good times,” he told me.
Chris and I knew each other a little from the Haddington High football team, but he was two years older, a varsity starter back when I was still warming the bench. I’d heard he’d gone to one of those small colleges in Pennsylvania, so I was pleasantly surprised to spot him in the hallway at ECC, where I hardly ever saw anyone I knew from high school (the only exception was Julian Spitzer, who seemed to pop up every time I turned a corner, though we always walked right past each other like we’d never met, like I hadn’t found him sleeping in my fucking bed that night, a memory that still gave me the creeps). Chris explained that he was home for the semester due to some disciplinary bullshit and said we should grab a beer sometime. I thought he was just saying it to be nice, but he repeated the offer when we bumped into each other at CrossFit, and it wasn’t like I had anything else going on.
“I guess you’ll be happy to get back there,” I said.
“I don’t know if I’m going back.” He wiped his mouth with a napkin, but he missed a greasy streak on his chin. “It’ll suck without the frat.”
“What do you mean?”
“They shut us down. Five-year suspension.”
“Why?”
“Because of the kid. You didn’t hear about it?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Huh.” He seemed surprised that it wasn’t a matter of common knowledge. “This freshman pledge died of alcohol poisoning at our house. It was all over the internet.”
“Holy shit. Were you there?”
“Kind of. I mean, I was playing air hockey in the game room, just minding my own business. I saw this kid staggering around, but he wasn’t the only one. All the pledges were shitfaced.” He pulled the visor of his baseball cap lower, like a celebrity who didn’t want to be recognized. “I guess he went outside to puke and everybody forgot about him. My buddy Johnny found him in the yard the next morning.”
“Jesus. How much did he drink?”
“A shitload of vodka shots.”