The Vanishing Half(67)
“She’s my wild child,” Blake said once, chuckling, as if it were something to be proud of.
But her wildness only scared Stella, disrupting the careful life she’d built. In the mornings, she’d stared across the breakfast table at a child she no longer recognized. Gone was her sweet-faced girl, and in her place, a tawny, long-limbed woman who changed her mind daily about the person she wanted to be. One morning, a faded Ramones T-shirt hung off her gaunt shoulders, the next, a plaid miniskirt inched up her thighs, and the next, a long dress flowed to her ankles. She’d dyed her hair pink, twice.
“Why can’t you just be yourself?” Stella asked once.
“Maybe I don’t know who that is,” her daughter shot back. And Stella understood, she did. That was the thrill of youth, the idea that you could be anyone. That was what had captured her in the charm shop, all those years ago. Then adulthood came, your choices solidifying, and you realize that everything you are had been set in motion years before. The rest was aftermath. So she understood why her daughter was searching for a self, and she even blamed herself for it. Maybe something in the girl was unsettled, a small part of her realizing that her life wasn’t right. As if she’d gotten older and started touching the trees, only to find that they were all cardboard sets.
“There’s no lecture,” Stella said. “I just want to make sure we’re thinking about next semester—”
“There it is.”
“You didn’t miss much time, sweetie. I know you’re excited about that play—”
“It’s a musical.”
“Whatever you call it—”
“Well, you’d know if you actually came to opening night.”
“How about this?” Stella said. “I’ll come to your play if you go down to the registrar—”
“Emotional blackmail,” she said. “That’s a new one for you.”
“Blackmail!” Stella leaned into the table, then dropped her voice. “Wanting what’s best for you is blackmail? Wanting you to get an education, to better yourself—”
“Your best isn’t necessarily mine,” her daughter said.
But what was Kennedy’s best, then? Stella had been shocked, and a little embarrassed, to learn that her daughter had spent the last semester on academic probation. “She’s young, she’ll figure it out,” Blake said, but Stella balked. She was some poor colored girl from nowhere Louisiana and even she’d managed a better showing than two C-minuses, two Ds, and a lone B-minus coming from a drama class. Drama wasn’t even a class—it was a hobby! A hobby that, months after that dismal semester, her daughter decided she was leaving school to pursue full time. What was the point, then, of giving a child everything? Buying books for her, enrolling her in the finest schools, hiring tutors, pleading her way into college—what was the point of any of it, if the result was only this, one bored girl gazing around a restaurant filled with some of the nation’s finest minds and playing idly with her soup?
“College isn’t for everyone, you know,” Kennedy said.
“Well, it is for you.”
“And how do you know that?”
“Because. You’re a smart girl. I know you are. You just don’t try. We don’t even know what you’re capable of when you try your hardest—”
“Maybe this is it! I’m not some big brain like you.”
“Well, I don’t believe that’s your best.”
“And how would you know?”
“Because I gave up too much for you to flunk out of school!”
Kennedy laughed, throwing up her hands. “Here we go again. It’s not my fault you grew up poor, Mother. You can’t blame me for shit that happened before I was born.”
A young black waiter leaned in to refill her water glass and Stella fell silent. She had chosen her own life, years ago; Kennedy had only cemented her into it. Recognizing this wasn’t the same as blaming her. She’d sacrificed for a daughter who could never learn what she’d lost. The time for honesty between the two of them had passed long ago. Stella dabbed her mouth with the white napkin, folding it back onto her lap.
“Lower your voice,” she said. “And don’t swear.”
* * *
—
“IT’S NOT THE end of the world,” Peg Davis said. “Lots of students take time off.”
Stella sighed. She was sitting across the desk in Peg’s cluttered office, which was always so messy that Stella had to slide books off the chair or spend ten minutes searching for Peg’s reading glasses, which were tucked under a pile of midterms. Peg could hire someone to help her organize. Stella had even volunteered to help. The office reminded her of living with Desiree, who’d spent far more time searching for lost things than she would have spent keeping her side of the room neat, but whenever Stella told her this, Desiree had rolled her eyes and said to stop mothering her. Peg was just as dismissive.
“Oh, they’re around here somewhere,” she said, each time she misplaced her keys, and like that, another meeting turned into a scavenger hunt.
You could be a bit of a wreck when you were a genius. Peg taught number theory, a field of mathematics that seemed so complicated, it might as well have been magic. Theoretical mathematics shared little in common with mathematical statistics, but Peg had offered to advise Stella anyway. She was the only tenured female professor in the math department, so she took on all the female students. Their first advising meeting, Peg had leaned back in her chair, studying her. The professor had long, graying blonde hair and wore round eyeglasses that covered half her face.