Goodman eating together in the dining hall. Maybe they were just friends, comparing the horror stories and complaints that any two middle-aged people living among the young would have. I asked her about him once, and she’d brushed me off. She said she wasn’t thinking of any of that right now. But I had my suspicions, or maybe just hope. Perhaps Gordon’s daughter did, too.
“I’m going to hop into my room and get dressed,” she said. “It’ll take me a minute. Veronica, honey, would you turn on some music? My CD player is behind you on the sill.”
She went into the other room, shutting the door behind her. I pushed the button on her little plastic stereo. It was Christmas music, “Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer.” Miles, still suspended from his father’s chest, started swinging his arms and legs. Charlie and I started to shimmy, too, trying to egg him on. But Elise seemed somber, staring at the table or, specifically, at the hot plate under the lasagna. She lifted the red fabric and, seeing the card table, pursed her lips.
“Don’t say anything about the ring,” she whispered. She looked at the space heater and swallowed. “And definitely don’t say anything about a wedding on a beach.”
Charlie and I both nodded. There was no reason to bring up my father’s engagement, at least not today. At the same time, I wasn’t sure my mother would be as upset as Elise seemed to think she would be. News of a beach wedding might annoy her, given her current income, but I just didn’t think that she would think about it for very long. Because of our strange circumstance, living and working so closely to one another, I got to see our mother in the day-today routine of her new life, and I knew more about it than Elise did. My mother and I were not chummy. We had decided that during the school year, we would keep our distance from each other, and live our respective lives. But I often saw her in the dining hall, though we didn’t eat together. Sometimes she would set her tray diagonally across from whomever she found sitting alone, striking up conversation, just in case the alone person wanted to talk. Sometimes she sat with Gordon, and sometimes with another woman who was the assistant hall director from another dorm, who looked even older than my mother.
I don’t mean to say that my mother looked particularly old. She only did in comparison to almost everyone around her, all of us needy and unknowingly needy kids. She was aware of her age, she said, the clock ticking all the time. She worried about retirement. She would get some money from my father, but not enough to live on indefinitely. She was unsure if she would be able to pull it off, starting again so late in the game. In another year, she would have a master’s in counseling and residence life, and then she could be an actual director, and make a little more money, and still get free room and board. Still, she said, she would have to live simply. Saving for her seventies, she called it. She had to make up for lost time.
In some ways, however—to me, at least—almost from the day she started her new job, she looked younger than she had in some time. Or maybe she just seemed happier, now that so much of what she was good at was being put to efficient use. Early one morning in September, a freshman in her dorm had crawled out onto the ledge of the sixth floor, wrapped only in a blanket, shivering, and refused to come back inside. The police had been called, and an ambulance. But it was my mother, leaning out the window, who talked with him for almost an hour, and convinced him to come back in. I don’t know what she said to him, or what he said to her. She wasn’t allowed to give me the details, or his name, even after his parents arrived to take him home or wherever it was that he went to try to get better.
So maybe it wasn’t that my mother seemed happier. It might be more accurate to say she seemed to have found her calling, or at least her second wind.
We exchanged gifts after dinner. Elise got our mother an ice blue cashmere scarf. She had told me in private that she hoped her gift would replace the