All We Ever Wanted(37)
After finishing my pint and eating more pizza than I think I’d ever had in one sitting, I paid the bill and got back in my car. I drove aimlessly, headed toward the West End, ending up in Centennial Park, where Kirk and I used to take Finch, beginning when he was only a baby in a stroller. I tried to pinpoint my favorite stage of his life—our lives together—deciding that our best years were during middle elementary. Third and fourth grades, ages eight and nine or so, when Finch was old enough to really articulate his opinions and have interesting conversations with me, but still young enough to hold my hand in public. The halfway point of childhood. God, I missed those days so much.
As I sat on the steps of the Parthenon, which housed the art museum where we used to stroll as a family, one memory rushed back to me. It was late fall, both of us wearing jackets, and I sat in a spot close to this one while Finch collected leaves pretending to make rutabaga and collard green stew. He’d learned the words from a children’s song, the lyrics all coming back to me now: Victor Vito and Freddie Vasco Ate a burrito with Tabasco They put it on their rice, they put it on their beans / on their rutabagas, and on their collard greens! I thought of how much Finch had loved to sing and dance. How much he’d enjoyed music and art and cooking.
“Girly things,” Kirk had called them, always worrying that I was making our son “too soft.”
I told him that was ridiculous, but at some point, I caved to my husband’s wishes, allowing Finch’s free time to be filled with more mainstream boy activities. Sports and technology (Kirk’s interests) replaced music and art (mine). I was fine with that—I just wanted our son to be true to himself—but with hindsight, I had the feeling that he was following in his father’s footsteps. In all ways.
Maybe it was an oversimplification, as I know a person isn’t the sum of his hobbies. But I couldn’t help feeling that I had lost my son. Lost both of them. I longed to go back. Do things differently. Give Finch fewer material possessions and more of my time. I would have tried harder to keep talking to him, even when he no longer wanted me to.
I thought back to my own time line—the uptick of my philanthropic work and all the socializing in those same circles that began a few years ago. How that swirl of activity happened to coincide with both the sale of Kirk’s company and the onset of Finch’s teenage years. It was hard to say which had happened first, but I wasn’t blameless. I thought about the hours I spent on the trivial things that had become so integral to my life. Meetings and parties and beauty appointments and workouts and tennis games and lunches and, yes, even some very worthwhile charity work. But to what end? Did any of that really matter now? What was more important than squeezing in a conversation with my son about respecting women and other cultures and races? I thought about Kirk and the hundred-dollar bills in my bag—how they pretty much summed up his approach to life, at least recently.
I thought about our marriage, wondering exactly when our priorities had shifted away from our relationship and toward other things. I thought about all our small, seemingly insignificant daily choices and their cumulative effect. How they may have impacted Finch, even subconsciously. He certainly didn’t see his parents talking much these days, and when we did, it was often about money or other superficial things. Even Kirk’s compliments to me were nearly always about my looks or purchases, not my ideas or good works or dreams (though I wasn’t even sure what those were anymore). Had it always been that way with Kirk and me? Or was I just noticing it now that Finch was older and consuming so much less of my time?
I felt a deep, aching loneliness, coupled with a painful longing for a simpler time. I missed all the chores that once felt so tedious—driving my son to school and to all his other activities, cooking breakfast and dinner for him, nagging him to go to bed, and even my least favorite, helping him with his homework at the kitchen table.
All of that segued into thoughts of Tom and Lyla. Their single-father/daughter relationship. Tom’s reaction to Kirk, then me. Lyla’s feelings about everything that had happened to her. I wanted to talk to her—so intensely that it didn’t quite make sense. Only it did—as if there was no way not to make a connection between the present and the past, her story and mine, ancient and buried though the memories were.
* * *
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IT HAPPENED IN the fall of my first semester at Vanderbilt, while I was still finding my footing and adjusting to a much bigger, fancier pond. I had been more than ready to graduate from high school and escape the mundane day-to-day of Bristol, but I was still a little homesick. More than missing my parents or home, my heart ached for Teddy, my boyfriend of nearly two years who was three hours away in Birmingham, going to Samford University on a basketball scholarship. Teddy and I talked on the phone every night, and wrote long letters by hand, always pledging our love and undying commitment to each other. There was no doubt in my mind that he was the “one.”
In the meantime, though, I forged a fledgling friend group, consisting of my roommate, Eliza, and another two girls on our hall—Blake and Ashley. Although the four of us were different in many ways, including geography (Eliza was from New York, Blake from L.A., and Ashley from Atlanta), the three of them all shared a certain wealthy worldliness, something I distinctly lacked. They’d all graduated from fancy private academies while I’d gone to a run-of-the-mill public high school. They’d traveled the world and visited many of the same spots, like Aspen and Nantucket and Paris. They’d even been to more exotic places, like Africa and Asia, while my family’s idea of a special trip was the Grand Canyon or Disney World. They were all foodies (before that really became a thing) and they constantly bitched about the cafeteria food (which I actually thought was pretty good). They lived for the emerging restaurant scene in Nashville and didn’t think twice about dropping their dads’ credit cards to pay for entrées in the double digits, which I could never afford. I avoided those outings—or declared myself “not very hungry” before finding something from the appetizer portion of the menu. Their wardrobes were insanely good (though Eliza and Blake went for edgier pieces than Ashley’s Laura Ashley look)—while my clothes were extremely basic; the Gap was my version of style. Although they weren’t trying to be snobs, they just sort of naturally were that way, and I found myself struggling to keep up with their sophisticated frame of reference, vacillating between feeling clueless and feeling embarrassed.