“Awesome,” said Shelby, her thumb busy on her phone’s screen.
“It looks really nice, Mom,” Sydney said correctively from the back seat.
Mary Ellen led them up the wide stairs and through the double doors, the girls keeping their heads down, hands stuffed in their pockets, uncharacteristically shy in the presence of so many college kids. “Pretty soon you’ll be one of them,” Mary Ellen said with a smile, reaching out to tuck a stray lock behind Sydney’s ear. Sydney ducked away from her touch.
“Mom, I don’t think we’re going to take marketing,” Shelby said.
“I know. I just wanted to show you where I spent so much of my time when I was here.” Mary Ellen looked around, trying to get her bearings amid the hurried throngs of laptop-clutching students. “They renovated,” she said. She peeked into a lecture hall where students were watching a video on a large screen. None of it felt familiar; the light was flatter, the ceilings lower, and there was something off about the proportions of the place. She led the girls down another corridor, looking for details to furnish her admittedly vague memories of Intro to Communications Strategy and Product Development 101. “I think I took data management in here,” she said, pulling open a door. A bearded man looked up, startled, from his desk. “Oh, excuse me!”
“Mom!”
“Anyway,” Mary Ellen said, turning back the way they’d come. “It was all so long ago. Kind of a blur, really.” She peered through a few more classroom windows, wondering what, exactly, she was looking for—some heady surge of nostalgia? She’d attended classes here, taken notes, met with her study group, but there was nothing so magical about that. She’d come here wanting to give the girls a sense of the wide-openness of it all—the thrilling expanse of possibility that she somehow associated with her college years. This particular building, with its drop ceilings and fluorescent lighting, wasn’t up to the task.
“Let’s walk around outside,” she said, turning to her daughters who, she realized, were no longer with her. She made her way through the crowd of chattering students, muttering “Excuse me” while scanning for a pair of blond ponytails. She scrabbled in her bag for her phone, feeling a reflexive twinge of maternal worry, but then the crowd thinned and she caught sight of the girls at the other end of the corridor, leaned against a wall, heads bowed like a pair of swans over their screens.
“There you are,” Mary Ellen said. In one long, fluid matching movement the girls pulled their gaze up and outward, blackened their screens, and slipped their phones into their pockets. “What are you doing?”
“Nothing.”
“What do you say we go somewhere a little more interesting?” She gestured toward the door with her head, and the girls obediently levered themselves away from the wall and followed her into the brassy autumn sunshine.
The lower quad, upper quad, the Old Well, the library. Mary Ellen was relieved to find them all pretty much where she remembered them, still manicured and picturesque. All around them, young people either strode purposefully down the brick walkways or lounged in sunny patches on the walls and stairs. Mary Ellen searched the girls’ faces for signs of interest, but they were in full slack-faced camouflage, hiding behind a veil of nonchalance.
She found herself in front of the Hanes Art Center, its brick crenellations and vast window grids a tribute to the factory-obsessed eighties. “Let’s take a look at the art studios,” she said, not bothering to check if this merited any change in her daughters’ facial expressions. She pushed through the glass doors and sunlight followed them in, spreading itself across the floor with proprietary ease.
Mary Ellen climbed the stairs and found an empty studio with a circle of chairs arrayed around a low platform. “Oh,” she said, slowly entering the room, her hand on her chest. “I remember this. The models, they would sit there, all…you know.” She looked back at Sydney and Shelby and mock-whispered, “Naked!” The girls stared at her curiously. “Well, we didn’t see that kind of thing as often as…you know.” She waved toward their phones. “It took some getting used to.”
“You mean they’d sit there for you to draw?” Sydney asked. “Like, live?”
“Live, yes. It was called life drawing.”
The twins furrowed their brows. “I think I’d be too embarrassed to move,” Sydney said. “Much less draw.”
“Really? It’s not so different from a locker room, is it?”
Shelby made a face. “Yeah, but you don’t look.”
“Seriously, Mom, were you dying?”
Mary Ellen shrugged. “It was strange at first, but you just…get used to it. You start drawing, and all this stuff starts to, I don’t know, fall away. Your hang-ups.” She remembered it so clearly now: the grain of the paper, the charcoal smearing under her damp palm, the way the model’s body had floated apart into ridges and knolls and hollows, each shape a landscape unto itself. The frustrating, invigorating debate between her eye and her hand as she groped around for the truth. It was only when she let go of her idea of a torso, her notion of a neck, that she really began to see. “I loved it,” she said, running her hand along the back of one of the chairs.
Some students began trickling into the room, so Mary Ellen took the girls down the hall to see the painting studio, a printmaking shop, a small gallery of student work. The air was thick with linseed fumes and the chalky smell of gesso, and Mary Ellen found herself inhaling deeply, every breath alive with memories. Seeing through the skin of the world, curling up inside a fleeting moment, opening herself up to truth—she’d known how to do these things once, or had been learning to, anyway. How strange to live life as two different people, to shed your old self like
