Did I think about my mother and Dog much?
If I said no, that once I got there it was a blur, making my way through those first few weeks, meeting people and professors and figuring everything out, that would be true. But it would also be a lie.
I pictured them, Tamar chopping wood and taking Dog on his walk, the two of them sleeping in the silent house under the silent stars in silent Sterns. But I couldn’t think about that for more than the second it took the scene to flash itself up into my head before I had to shut it down. Calm down, Clara. Breathe.
It was just the two of them, was why. The two of them in the one house and each of their days was exactly like the one that came before and the one that would come after. Unlike the way it was for me. Me and a thousand others my age around me and my life, my life that was blowing open, the ceilings and doors and windows of that life I had known in Sterns, the life my mother was so insistent I leave, now disappearing.
* * *
The next time I saw Dog in real life, after I left for my first year of college, was on Parents’ Weekend. It had been only two months. Two months since I watched them disappear around the bend, Tamar driving and Dog with his head hanging out the half-open window, staring at me, unblinking.
Everything was different by then. I talked different I ate different I dressed different I studied different, focused and deep-down scared because everyone around me was smart. They all raised their hands right away during class discussions while I was still trying to understand the question being asked. They were all uppercase Confident College Students to my lowercase clara winter. It was a different world I lived in now, and I was a different girl in it.
That Friday I waited outside Mulberry Hall with everyone else who was waiting for their parents. There would be a Parents’ Tea and a President’s Dinner and a football game and a Campus Walkabout and a Sunday Brunch and I had the schedule in my hand as I waited. I was wearing the new boots I had bought at the boot store downtown, the real leather boots that took every penny of the money I had made over the last two months serving up breakfast in the cafeteria, my work-study job. Scrambled fried hardboiled poached. I had never heard of poached eggs before and if I had landed on Eggs for $400 and it turned out to be the Daily Double, I would’ve bet it all that Tamar had never heard of them either.
Then she and Dog were there and I forgot everything.
“Ma!”
She had parked somewhere—where, I didn’t know; I hadn’t seen the truck pull up even though I was outside watching for it—and Dog was on his rarely used leash. They were making their halting way through the crowds of parents and children.
“Ma!”
Sunshine was next to me, waiting for her family, and she looked at me with curiosity, but I didn’t look back. I cupped my hands around my mouth and shouted again: “Ma! Ma!” but it was Dog who heard me first, or smelled me, because suddenly there he was. A bounding blur of fur leaping into the air and shoving himself against the unfamiliar leash, trying to get to me. Then he was on me and we were both on the ground, me with my arms around him, both of us pushing our noses into each other’s necks because there he was. There he was, and there I was, and a lump rose up in my throat. Dog.
Tamar was there too, then, her hand white-knuckled around his leash. Jeans and white Keds that she had re-whitened for the occasion with roll-on polish. The roll-on marks were evident. She was wearing her lumber jacket. It was a cold day but I wore only a sweater because that was what we did back then in college: we pretended we weren’t cold, we pretended that a crewneck sweater was all we needed even on a day of bitter wind. Her hand touched my shoulder.
“You’re cold.”
That was the first thing she said. I looked up from the ground at her Tamar face looking down at me. This was the longest I had ever been away from my mother. Her hair looked shorter. Dog had climbed up onto my lap with his paws on my shoulders. He was still pushing his nose into my neck, my hair, my collarbones.
“No I’m not.”
“You are, though.” Her palm was on my cheek. “Your cheek is like ice.”
“I’m not cold at all,” I lied.
I took her and Dog around to all the classroom buildings, to the dorm where Sunshine and I had hung India batik prints on the walls to “warm them up.” A phrase that belonged to Sunshine, along with the batiks, a phrase and a thing I’d never seen before that fall. I told Tamar that my classes were lots of work but great, that I studied lots but it was nothing I couldn’t handle, that I had made lots of friends—the word lots kept coming out of my mouth—that the sleeping bag was coming in handy, that on Friday nights we all walked into town with our fake IDs for pitchers of happy-hour beer and 2/$5 Cape Codders and screwdrivers, followed by dancing at The Excuse, that the cafeteria food was really not bad at all, even poached eggs, once you got used to them.
What was really happening was that I was pushing it all at her, all this information, all this breeziness and chatter, because what was done was done. She had forced me out of Sterns and out of upstate New York and out of everything I had known until now. She had banished me from my own life, and even though I had raged and fought against her grim decision, I had gone along with it, hadn’t I? I could have run away, couldn’t I? I could have flat-out said no. But I hadn’t.
I had always assumed I would live in Sterns, where my childhood friends grew up and would continue to live, solid black arrows of parents and children and grandchildren within a few miles of one another. In leaving, I had thought my mother was forcing me out, but the truth was this: she had seen a bigger life for me than I had imagined. And she had been right.
But right didn’t mean easy. I couldn’t take the presence of her, the literal Tamar presence of her, her in her re-whitened sneakers and her jeans and her lumber jacket held together with duct tape patches on the inside, her hand still gripping Dog’s leash.
I wanted her so much.
I wanted to be in her kitchen, my kitchen, our kitchen, sitting next to her by the woodstove. I wanted Dog, Dog with the old stuffed monkey that Asa had given him dangling from his jaws, turning three times in a circle before thumping down onto the rug beside us and tucking himself into a fur comma. I missed her so terribly, now that she was there, right beside me, and I had to shut down that terrible missing so that it wouldn’t crush me with its power.