She has also begun the job of badgering her younger son about college. As expected, he is more interested in playing football than filling out applications, and she fears that any lapse of persistence on her part will lead to the casual trashing of his future and—more profoundly—to the reversal of her bloodline’s ascent. Lori was the first to attend state college; it rests with her children to pierce the private sphere.
She is gratified to have succeeded with her older son, whom they dropped off at a well-regarded, very expensive university just two weeks earlier. Perversely, her reward for this success has been Kurt’s empty bedroom, finally tidy, but so vacant that she cannot look in. For the past two weeks, she’s struggled against telephoning him. She knows it’s better to stay cool, to wait for him to make contact. Again, patience! And her waiting has paid off: he’d finally called the day before, although she has to admit that the conversation had been short and unsatisfying. He is planning to take a class in a subject Lori didn’t quite catch—social biology? bio-anthropology?—and she hung up the phone with a strained good-bye and the feeling of a gauzy cluster in her throat.
The cars keep coming. Lori sits erect in the driver’s seat, calm, like a good student, still silently berating herself for the missed opportunity to make her turn. Now she is going to be behind schedule; she is going to have to rush when she gets home. She has already chosen a dress for the party, but she hasn’t actually worn it in centuries and is concerned that it might need ironing, or might not fit the way it used to. She should have tried it on earlier in the week. But, really, how was she to have guessed that she’d be held up tonight, and for such a silly reason? When she’d rushed out of the house that afternoon, she hadn’t intended to be gone for more than twenty minutes. She hadn’t even brought her cell phone.
And, really, this is getting ridiculous. People live on this road. How do they contend with this intersection day after day? She looks for evidence of previous trouble—skid marks on the road, bark shaved from trees—but finds none. Her current difficulty must be a fluke. She considers turning around, going back down Iron Horse, back to Edgeware, back home via dependable Mercy and its protracted but functional stoplight. If she had only taken the usual route in the first place, she would be home by now; she would already have tried on the dress and begun fixing her hair. A broken-down Volvo comes past with a patchwork of bumper stickers on its rear. No. If she goes back now, the traffic will relent the instant she is out of sight. She’s lived long enough to know that’s how the world works. And she’s committed too much time to waiting already. How much time has it been? It feels like ten minutes, maybe more. It’s better, she thinks, not to look at the clock.
Again, a space approaches, but this one she judges to be too tight. The decision is made: she will not accelerate; it’s not worth the risk. Instead, she sits and waits as the Toyota speeds past, followed by a long brown Cadillac. She sits and waits as the Cadillac approaches, and realizes too late that it is traveling at an exaggeratedly slow speed, that she could have gone in front of it politely at least three times. As it passes, she sees the driver’s head in profile, straining forward in the way of the elderly. Somewhere, she imagines, are the man’s worried adult children, exasperated by their father’s refusal to give up his license, by his insistence that his reflexes are still sharp as knives.
Lori takes a deep breath and holds it, calling up reserves of patience. It is not so easy to control the proud and aging. Her own parents are still stubbornly upstate, holding on to the decaying home of her childhood, despite its staircases and sunken living room, despite the Hasidic families swarming the neighborhood like black ants. Her mother has fallen twice already, bruising each hip. And yet they refuse to visit the assisted-living facility Lori has found for them here in town, where they could have an apartment with its own kitchenette. They don’t want a kitchenette, her mother says. They want to stay where they are comfortable, and stay there until they die.