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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.
>“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.”
