Just One Day (12 page)

My hand flies up to my neck. The bandage has come off, and the scabby cut is starting
to itch. “Nothing,” I say. “It was an . . . ” I’m about to say accident, but I stop
myself. “A tree.”

“And where’s your lovely watch?” she asks.

I look down at my wrist. I see my birthmark, ugly, naked, blaring. I yank down my
sweater sleeve to cover it. “He has it.”

She clucks her tongue. “They’ll do that, sometimes. Take things as a sort of trophy.
Like serial killers.” She takes a final slurp of her tea. “Now, shall we take you
to Melanie?”

I hand Ms. Foley the scrap of paper with Veronica’s address, and she pulls out a
London A–Z
book to chart our way. I fall asleep on the Tube, my tears wrung out, the blankness
of exhaustion the only comfort I have now. Ms. Foley shakes me awake at Veronica’s
stop and leads me to the redbricked Victorian house where her flat is.

Melanie comes bounding to the door, already dressed up for tonight’s trip to the theater.
Her face is lit up with anticipation, waiting to hear a really good story. But then
she sees Ms. Foley, and her expression skids. Without knowing anything, she knows
everything: She bid Lulu farewell at the train station yesterday, and it’s Allyson
being returned to her like damaged goods. She gives the slightest of nods, as if none
of this surprises her. Then she kicks off her heels and opens her arms to me, and
when I step into them, the humiliation and heartbreak bring me to my knees. Melanie
sinks to the ground alongside me, her arms hugging me tight. Behind me, I hear Ms.
Foley’s retreating footsteps. I let her leave without saying a word. I don’t thank
her. And I already know that I never will, and that is wrong considering the great
kindness she’s done me. But if I am to survive, I can never, ever visit this day again.

PART TWO

One Year

Fourteen

SEPTEMBER

College

A
llyson. Allyson. Are you
there
?”

I pull the pillow over my head and scrunch my eyes shut, faking sleep.

The key turns in the lock as my roommate Kali pushes open the door. “I wish you wouldn’t
lock
the
door
when you are
here
. And I
know
you’re not
asleep
. You’re just playing
dead
. Like
Buster
.”

Buster is Kali’s dog. A Lhasa apso. She has pictures of him among the dozens tacked
up on the wall. She told me all about Buster last July when we had our initial howdy-roommate
phone call. Back then, I thought Buster sounded cute, and I found it quirky that Kali
was named for her home state, and the way she talked—as if she were punching her words
somehow—seemed sweet.

“Okaay, Allyson.
Fine
. Don’t answer, but look, can you
call
your parents back? Your
mother
called
my
cell looking for
you
.”

From under the pillows, I open my eyes. I’d wondered how long I could leave my phone
uncharged before something would happen. Already there’s been a mysterious UPS delivery.
I was half expecting a carrier pigeon to arrive. But calling my roommates?

I hide under the pillow as Kali changes into going-out clothes, applying makeup and
spritzing herself with that vanilla-scented perfume that gets into everything. After
she leaves, I take the pillow off my head and swing my legs over the side of the bed.
I push aside my chemistry textbook, the highlighter sitting in the crease, uncapped,
ever hopeful it’ll get used before it dries up from neglect. I locate my dead phone
in my sock drawer and kick through the dirty laundry piled in my closet for the charger.
When it charges back to life, the voice mail box tells me I have twenty-two new messages.
I scroll through the missed calls. Eighteen are from my parents. Two from my grandmother.
One from Melanie, and one from the registrar.

“Hi, Allyson, it’s your mother. Just calling to check in to see how everything is
going. Give me a call.”

“Hi, Allyson. It’s Mom. I got the new Boden catalog, and there are some cute skirts.
And some warm corduroy jeans. I’ll just order some and bring them up for Parents’
Weekend. Call me back!”

Then there’s one from my dad. “Your mother wants to know where we should make reservations
for Parents’ Weekend: Italian or French or maybe Japanese. I told her you’d be grateful
for anything. I can’t imagine dorm food has improved that much in twenty-five years.”

Then we’re back to Mom: “Allyson, is your phone broken? Please tell me you did not
lose that too. Can you please touch base? I’m trying to schedule Parents’ Weekend.
I thought I might to come to classes with you. . . .”

“Hi, Ally, it’s Grandma. I’m on Facebook now. I’m not sure how it works, so make me
your friend. Or you could call me. But I want to do it how you kids do it.”

“Allyson, it’s Dad. Call your mother. Also, we are trying to get reservations at Prezzo. . . .”

“Allyson, are you ill? Because I can really think of no other explanation for the
radio silence. . . .”

The messages go downhill from there, Mom acting like three months, not three days,
have gone by since our last phone call. I wind up deleting the last batch without
even listening, stopping only for Melanie’s rambling account about school and hot
New York City guys and the superiority of the pizza there.

I look at the time on my phone. It’s six o’clock. If I call home, maybe Mom will be
out and I’ll get the machine. I’m not quite sure what she does with her days now.
When I was seven, she wound up leaving her job, even though she didn’t take that maternity
leave after all. The plan had been to go back to work once I went to college, but
it hasn’t quite got off the ground yet.

She picks up on the second ring. “Allyson, where have you been?” Mom’s voice is officious,
a little impatient.

“I ran off to join a cult.” There’s a brief pause, as if she’s actually considering
the possibility of this. “I’m at college, Mom. I’m busy. Trying to adjust to the workload.”

“If you think this is bad, wait until medical school. Wait until your residency! I
hardly saw your father.”

“Then you should be used to it.”

Mom pauses. This snarkiness of mine is new. Dad says ever since I came back from Europe,
I have come down with a case of delayed teenageritis. I never acted like this before,
but now I apparently have a bad attitude and a bad haircut and an irresponsibility
streak, as evidenced by the fact that I lost not just my suitcase and all its contents,
but my graduation watch too, even though, according to the story Melanie and I told
them, the suitcase and the watch inside it were stolen off the train. Which theoretically
should make me blameless. But it doesn’t. Perhaps because I’m not.

Mom changes the subject. “Did you get the package? It’s one thing if you ignore me,
but your grandmother would appreciate a note.”

I kick through the rumpled sour clothes for the UPS box. Wrapped in bubble wrap is
an antique Betty Boop alarm clock and a box of black-and-white cookies from Shriner’s,
a bakery in our town. The sticky note on the cookies says
These are from Grandma
.

“I thought the clock would go perfect in your collection.”

“Uh-huh.” I look at the still-packed boxes in my closet, where my alarm clock collection,
and all my nonessential stuff from home, still remains.

“And I ordered you a bunch of new clothes. Shall I send them or just bring them up?”

“Just bring them, I guess.”

“Speaking of Parents’ Weekend, we’re firming up plans. Saturday night we are trying
to get dinner reservations at Prezzo. Sunday is the brunch, and after that, before
we fly home, your father has an alumni thing, so I thought I’d splurge on spa treatments
for us. Oh, and Saturday morning, before the luncheon, I’m having coffee with Kali’s
mother, Lynn. We’ve been emailing.”

“Why are you emailing my roommate’s mother?”

“Why not?” Mom’s voice is snippy, as if there is no reason for me to be asking about
this, as if there is no reason for her not to be present in every single part of my
life.

“Well, can you not call Kali’s cell? It’s a little weird.”

“It’s a little weird to have your daughter go incommunicado for a week.”

“Three days, Mom.”

“So you were counting too.” She pauses, scoring herself the point. “And if you would
let me install a house phone, we wouldn’t have this issue.”

“No one has landlines anymore. We all have cells. Our own numbers. Please don’t call
me on hers.”

“Then return my calls, Allyson.”

“I will. I just lost my charger,” I lie.

Her aggrieved sigh on the other end of the line makes me realize I’ve picked the wrong
lie. “Must we tie your belongings to you with a rope these days?” she asks.

“I just loaned it to my roommate, and it got put away with her stuff.”

“You mean Kali?”

Kali and I have barely shared a bar of soap. “Right.”

“I’m looking forward to meeting her and her family. They seem lovely. They invited
us to La Jolla.”

I almost ask my mother if she really wants to get chummy with people who named their
daughter Kali for California. Mom has a thing about names; she hates nicknames. When
I was growing up, she was kind of fascist about it, always trying to prevent anyone
from shortening my name to Ally or Al. Grandma ignored her, but everyone else, even
teachers at school, toed the line. I never got why, if it bothered her so much, she
didn’t just name me something that couldn’t be truncated, even if Allyson is a family
name. But I don’t say anything about Kali because if I get bitchy, I’ll blow my cover
as Happy College Student. And my mother especially, whose parents couldn’t afford
to send her to the college of her choice and who had to work her way through college
and later support Dad while he was in medical school, is very intent that I be a Happy
College Student.

“I should go,” I tell her. “I’m going out with my roommates tonight.”

“Oh, how fun! Where are you going?”

“To a party.”

“A keg party?”

“Maybe the movies.”

“I just saw a great one with Kate Winslet. You should see that one.”

“Okay, I will.”

“Call me tomorrow. And leave your phone on.”

“Professors tend to frown on calls in classes.” The snark comes out again.

“Tomorrow’s Saturday. And I know your schedule, Allyson. All your classes are in the
mornings.”

She
would
know my schedule. She basically created it. All those morning classes because she
said they’d be less attended and I’d get more attention and then I’d have the whole
rest of the day for studying. Or, as it turns out, for sleeping.

After we hang up, I shove the alarm clock into a box in my closet and take the cookies
and bring them into the lounge where the rest of my roommates have started in on a
six-pack. They’re all dressed up and ready to go out.

When school started, the rest of them were so excited. They really were Happy College
Students. Jenn made organic brownies, and Kendra drew up a little sign on our door
with all our names and a moniker, the Fab Four, atop it. Kali, for her part, gave
us coupons to a tanning salon to ward off the inevitable seasonal affective disorder.

Now, a month in, the three of them are a solid unit. And I’m like a goiter. I want
to tell Kendra that it’s okay if she takes down the little sign or replaces it with
one that says something like Terrific Trio* and Allyson.

I shuffle into the lounge. “Here,” I say, handing over the cookies to Kali, even though
I know she watches her carbs and even though black-and-whites are my favorites. “I’m
really sorry about my mom.”

Kendra and Jenn cluck sympathetically, but Kali narrows her eyes. “I don’t want to
be a
bitch
or anything, but it’s bad enough having to fend off my
own
parents, okaay?”

“She’s having Empty Nest or something.” That’s what Dad keeps telling me. “She won’t
do it again,” I add with more confidence than I possess.

“My mom turned my bedroom into a craft room two days after I left,” Jenn says. “At
least you’re missed.”

“Uh-huh.”

“What kind of cookies are they?” Kendra asks.

“Black-and-whites.”

“Just like us,” Kendra jokes. She’s black, or African American; I’m never sure which
is right, and she uses both.

“The racial harmony of cookies,” I say.

Jenn and Kendra laugh. “You should come out with us tonight,” Jenn says.

“We’re going to a party over at Henderson and then there’s this bar over on Central
that apparently has a very liberal carding policy,” Kendra says, twisting her just-straightened
black hair up into a bun, then thinking twice about it and pulling it down. “Lots
of fine male specimen.”

“And female specimen, if that’s your thing,” Jenn adds.

“It’s not my thing. I mean, none of it is my thing.”

Kali gives me a bitchy smirk. “Think you enrolled in the
wrong
school. I believe there’s a
convent
in Boston.”

Something twists in my stomach. “They don’t take Jews.”

“Back off, you two,” Kendra says, ever the diplomat. She turns to me. “Why not come
out for a few hours?”

“Chemistry. Physics.” The room goes silent. They’re all liberal arts or business majors,
so invoking Science shuts them up.

“Well, I’d better get back to my room. I have a date with the Third Law of Thermodynamics.”

“Sounds hot,” Jenn says.

I smile to show I actually get the joke, then shuffle back to my room, where I diligently
pick up
Foundations of Chemistry
, but by the time the Terrific Trio are heading out the door, my eyes have sandbags
in them. I fall asleep under a mountain of unread science. And thus begins another
weekend in the life of the Happy College Student.

Fifteen

OCTOBER

College

I
put off thinking about Parents’ Weekend as long as I can and then the Thursday before
they’re due to arrive, I look around my dorm and see it not as I see it—walls, a bed,
a desk, a dresser—but as my parents will see it. This is not the dorm of a Happy College
Student. There’s dirty laundry spilling out of every drawer, and my papers are everywhere.
My mother despises clutter. I ditch my classes and spend the day cleaning. I haul
all the dirty laundry down to the washing machines and sit with it as it turns and
gyrates. I wipe down the dusty surfaces. In the closet, I hide away all my current
schoolwork—the Mandarin worksheets, piling up like unread newspapers, the Scantron
chemistry and physics exams with their ominously low scores scrawled in red; the lab
reports with comments like “Need to be more thorough” and “Check your calculations!”
and the dreaded “See me.” In their place, I set out a bunch of decoy notes and graphs
from early in the term, before I started obviously bombing. I unwrap the duvet cover
we bought at Bed, Bath & Beyond last summer and put it over the plain quilt I’ve been
sleeping under. I grab some of the photos from the boxes and scatter them around the
room. I even drop by the U bookstore and buy one of the stupid banners with the school
name on it and tack it above my bed.
Voilà
. School Spirit.

But somehow I forget the clocks. And this gives me away.

When Mom comes into the dorm, after cooing over our tiny dump of a lounge, she oohs
over Kali’s pictures of Buster and then looks at my relatively bare walls and gasps.
By her look of horror, you’d think I’d decorated with crime-scene photos. “Where’s
your collection?”

I point to the boxes in the closet, unopened.

“Why are they there?”

“They’re too noisy,” I quickly lie. “I don’t want to bother Kali with them.” Never
mind the fact that Kali blasts her radio at seven in the morning.

“You could put them out and not wind them,” she says. “Those clocks are you.”

Are they? I don’t remember when I started collecting them. Mom liked to go to flea
markets on weekends and then one day, I was a clock collector. I got really into it
for a while, but I don’t remember the moment I saw an old alarm clock and thought,
I want to collect these.

“Your half looks terribly barren next to Kali’s,” Mom says.

“You should’ve seen my dorm,” Dad says, lost in his haze of nostalgia. “My roommate
put tinfoil on the windows. It looked like a spaceship. He called it the ‘Future Dorm.’”

“I was going for Minimalist Dorm.”

“It has a certain penitentiary charm,” Dad says.

“It’s like a before/after on one of those home décor shows.” Mom points to Kali’s
half of the room, over which every inch of wall space is covered either with posters,
art prints, or photos. “You’re the before,” she says. As if I didn’t already get that.

We head off to one of the special workshops, something insanely dull on the changing
face of technology in the classroom. Mom actually takes notes. Dad points out every
little thing that he remembers and every little thing that is new. This is what he
did when we toured the school last year; both he and Mom were so excited about the
prospect of me going here. Creating a legacy. Somehow, back then, I was excited too.

After the workshop, Dad meets up with other legacy parents, and Mom has coffee with
Kali’s mom, Lynn. They seem to get along famously. Either Kali hasn’t told her mom
what a dud I am, or if she has, her mom has the good grace to shut up about it.

Before the President’s Luncheon, all four members of the Fab Four and their respective
families meet back at the suite and the parents all introduce themselves and cluck
over the tininess of our rooms and admire what we’ve done with our tiny lounge and
take pictures of
THE FAB FOUR WELCOMES THE FAB EIGHT
sign that the rest of the group made. Then we all walk out onto the quad together
and tour the campus, going the long way around to point out some of the older, statelier
buildings, reddening ivy creeping up old bricks. And everyone looks nice together
in flannel skirts and tall black boots and cashmere sweaters and shearling jackets
as we swish through the autumnal leaves. We really do look like the Happy College
Students in the catalogs.

The luncheon is fine and boring, rubber chicken and rubber speeches in a big, cold
echoey hall. It’s only after the luncheon that the myth of the Fab Four starts to
unravel. Ever so subtly, Kendra’s and Jenn’s and Kali’s families all peel off together.
I’m sure they’re talking about Christmas and Thanksgiving holidays and spring breaks
and potlucks and things like that. My mom gives them a look but doesn’t say anything.

She and Dad go back to the hotel to get ready for dinner. Mom tells me the place is
fancy and suggests I wear my black and red wrap dress. And that I wash my hair, which
is looking greasy.

When they come back to pick me up, there’s an awkward moment as my family meets up
with the rest of the Fab Four and their Fab Families, who are all going together to
a big group dinner at some famous seafood place in downtown Boston. There’s a sort
of standoff as my parents face the other parents. The rest of my roommates, their
faces pinking, take a huge interest in the industrial gray carpeting. Finally, Jenn’s
dad steps in and offers a belated invitation for us to join the rest of them for dinner.
“I’m sure we can squeeze three more in.”

“Oh, that won’t be necessary,” Mom says in her haughtiest voice. “We have reservations
at Prezzo in Back Bay.”

“Wow! How’d you manage that?” Lynn asks. “We tried and couldn’t get in until next
month.” Prezzo, according to Mom, is the hottest restaurant in town.

Mom smiles mysteriously. She won’t tell, though Dad told me one of his golf buddies
had a friend on the faculty at a hospital in Boston and he pulled some strings to
get us in. Mom had been so pleased about it, but I can see now the victory is sullied.

“Enjoy your chowdah,” she says. Only Dad and I catch how condescending she’s being.

Dinner is painful. Even sitting at this chichi place with all the best Bostonians,
I can tell Mom and, by extension, Dad feel like rejects. And they’re not. It’s my
rejection they’re feeling.

They ask me about my classes, and I dutifully tell them about chemistry, physics,
biology, and Mandarin, neglecting to tell them how hard it is stay awake in class,
no matter how early I go to bed, or how badly I’m doing in subjects I aced in high
school. Talking about, or not talking about, all this makes me so tired I want to
put my head down into my thirteen-dollar salad.

When the entrees come, Mom orders a glass of Chardonnay, Dad a Shiraz. I try not to
look at the way the candlelight dances against the colors of the wine. Even that hurts.
I look down at my plate of ravioli. It smells good, but I have no desire to eat it.

“Are you coming down with something?” Mom asks.

And for just the tiniest of seconds, I wonder what would happen if I told them the
truth. That school is nothing like I imagined it would be. That I’m not the girl in
the catalog at all. I’m not a Happy College Student. I don’t know who I am. Or maybe
I do know who I am and I just don’t want to be her anymore.

But this is not an option. Mom would just be aggrieved, disappointed, as if my unhappiness
were some personal insult to her parenting. And then she’d guilt me out about how
I’m so lucky. This is college! The college experience she didn’t get to have. Which
was one of the reasons she spent all of high school like an army general, plotting
my extracurriculars, getting me tutors for weak subjects, signing me up for SAT prep.

“I’m just tired,” I say. This, at least, isn’t a lie.

“You’re probably spending too much time in the library,” Dad interjects. “Are you
getting enough sunlight? That can really affect your circadian rhythms.”

I shake my head. This too is true.

“Have you been running? There are some nice tracks around here. And it’s not too far
to the river.”

I think the last time I went running was with Dad, a couple days before I left for
the tour.

“We’ll go out tomorrow morning, before the brunch. Burn off dinner. Get some air in
those lungs.”

Just the thought of it makes me exhausted, but this isn’t an invitation so much as
an expectation, and the plans are being made even before I’ve agreed to them.

_ _ _

The following morning, the rest of the girls are sitting in the lounge drinking coffee,
happily chattering about their dinner, which included some incident with a cute waiter
and a lobster mallet that’s already being mythologized into a tale called “The Hammer
and the Hottie.” They double-take when they see me in tracksuit bottoms and a fleece
sweatshirt, looking around for my running shoes. Our dorm has a state-of-the-art gym
that Kendra and Kali are addicted to and Jenn gets dragged along to, but I have yet
to set foot in.

I just expect my dad, but Mom is there too, all perky in her black wool pants, a cashmere
cape. “I thought we were meeting at brunch,” I say.

“Oh, I just wanted to spend some time in your dorm. It’ll help me to picture where
you are when I’m not with you.” She turns to Kali. “If that’s okay with you.” Her
voice is so polite, Kali might never catch the bitchiness in it.

“
I
think it’s
sweet
,” Kali says.

“Are you ready, Allyson?” Dad asks me.

“Almost. I can’t find my running shoes.”

Mom gives me a look, like I obviously lose everything all the time now.

“Where’s the last place you left them?” Dad asks. “Just picture it. That’s how you
find missing things.” This is his typical advice, but it usually works. And sure enough,
when I picture my shoes, still packed in the suitcase under my bed, that’s where they
are.

When we get downstairs, Dad does some halfhearted stretches. “Let’s see if I remember
how to do this,” he jokes. He’s not much of a runner, but he’s always telling his
patients to exercise, so he tries to practice what he preaches.

We take off on a path toward the river. It is a true autumn day, clear and brisk with
a sharp bite of winter in the air. I don’t love running, not at first, but usually
after ten minutes or so, that thing kicks in and I sort of zone out and forget what
I’m doing. Today, though, every time I even begin to lose myself, it’s like my mind
defaults to that other run, the best run, the run of my life, the run
for
my life. And then my legs turn into waterlogged tree trunks, and all the beautiful
fall colors fade to gray.

After about a mile, I have to stop. I claim a cramp. I want to go back, but Dad wants
to check out the downtown and see what’s changed, so we do. We stop at a café for
cappuccinos, and Dad asks me about my classes and waxes nostalgic for his days in
organic chemistry. Then he tells me how busy he’s been and that Mom is having a really
hard time and I should go easy on her.

“Isn’t she supposed to be going back to work?” I ask.

Dad looks at his watch. “Time to go,” he says.

Dad leaves me at the dorm to change before brunch. As soon as I step inside, I know
something’s wrong. I hear ticking. And then I look around, and for a second, I’m confused
because the dorm no longer looks like my dorm but like my bedroom at home. Mom has
dug up all the posters from my closet and put them up in the exact same configuration
as at home. She’s moved my photos around, so they too are a mirror image of my old
room. She’s made the bed with a mountain of throw pillows, the throw pillows I specifically
said I didn’t want to bring because I hate throw pillows. You have to take them off
and reorganize them every day. On top of the bed are clothes that Mom is folding into
neat piles and laying out for me, just like she did when I was in fourth grade.

And along my windowsills and bookcases are all my clocks. All of them wound up and
ticking.

Mom looks up from snipping the tags off a pair of pants I haven’t even tried on. “You
seemed so glum last night. I thought it might perk you up if it looked more like home
in here. This is so much cheerier,” she declares.

I begin to protest. But I’m not sure
what
to protest.

“And I spoke to Kali, and she finds the sound of the clocks soothing. Like a white-noise
machine.”

They don’t sound soothing to me at all. They sound like a hundred time bombs waiting
to explode.